Legacy preferences

History

While the sons of wealthy Americans had received priority in college admissions throughout the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century, frustrated by the poor academic performances of their students, elite colleges raised their admission standards. Immigrants—especially the children of Jewish immigrant families—and Catholics and people from modest socioeconomic backgrounds frequently performed well on the new admissions tests and started to garner large numbers of undergraduate seats at top universities, while the number of admissions for wealthy white Anglo-American stock dropped significantly. In response, several Ivy League institutions began an official practice of legacy admissions, designed to reserve large numbers of seats at the top schools for the sons of wealthy Protestant American stock. These legacy admissions included decreasing the importance of entrance exams and adding such elements as assessing the "personal characteristics" of the young men seeking admittance, considering their "home influence," interviewing some of the applicants, and asking for letters of recommendation attesting to their character. Such elements in the application process curtailed the admittance of immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and working-class men and restored the overwhelming presence of the white, wealthy Anglo-Protestant men.

A 1992 survey found that of the top seventy-five universities in the "U.S. News & World Report" rankings, only one (the California Institute of Technology) had no legacy preferences at all. Legacy preferences were also ubiquitous among the one hundred top-ranked liberal arts colleges. The only liberal arts college in the top one hundred that explicitly said it did not use legacy preferences was Berea. In recent decades, the use of legacy preferences has expanded well beyond undergraduate studies and now include admissions to graduate schools and professional fields of study, including law schools.

Current practices

Currently, the Ivy League institutions are estimated to admit 10% to 30% of each entering class using legacy admissions. For example, in the 2008 entering undergraduate class, the University of Pennsylvania admitted 41.7% of legacies who applied during the early decision admissions round and 33.9% of legacies who applied during the regular admissions cycle, versus 29.3% of all students who applied during the early decision admissions round and 16.4% of all who applied during the regular cycle. In 2009, Princeton admitted 41.7% of legacy applicants—more than 4.5 times the 9.2% rate of non-legacies. Similarly, in 2006, Brown University admitted 33.5% of alumni children, significantly higher than the 13.8% overall admissions rate. In 2003, Harvard admitted 40% of legacy applicants, compared to the overall 11% acceptance rate. In short, Ivy League and other top schools typically admit legacies at two to five times their overall admission rates.

Legacy preference is not strictly limited to college admissions, however; it may also come about with regard to admission into collegiate fraternities and sororities and other fraternal organizations such as Freemasonry. Legacy preferences are generally not allowed in Europe.

The advantages that colleges offer legacy students extend well beyond admission preferences. Many colleges have various mechanisms for coaching legacies through the admissions process and for advising them about strategies for constructing successful applications, including notifying legacies of the edge that they can gain by applying early. Some universities have alumni councils that provide legacies with special advising sessions, pair these would-be students with current legacy students, and generally provide advice and mentoring for legacy applicants. Some universities employ admissions counselors dedicated solely to legacy applicants, and it is common to provide scholarships or tuition discounts earmarked especially for legacies and for legacies to be charged in-state tuition fees when they are out-of-state residents. In cases where legacies are rejected, some universities offer legacy admissions counseling and help with placement at other colleges. Such students are often encouraged to enroll at a lesser ranked school for one or two years to prove themselves and then to reapply as transfer students. Because rankings by U.S. News & World Report and other media take into account only the SAT scores and high school grades of entering freshmen, a college can accept poor achieving legacies as transfer students without hurting its standing. Harvard caters to the children of well-connected alumni and big donors through the "Z-list". Z-listers are often guaranteed admittance while in high school but obliged to take a year off between high school and attending Harvard, doing whatever they wish in the interim.

Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has stated, "Legacy admissions are integral to the kind of community that any private educational institution is." In the 1998 book The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, authors William G. Bowen, former Princeton University president, and Derek Bok, former Harvard University president, found "the overall admission rate for legacies was almost twice that for all other candidates." While the preference is quite common in elite universities and liberal arts colleges, it is quite controversial, with 75% of Americans opposing the preference.

In comparison to other programmes

At some schools, legacy preferences have an effect on admissions comparable to other factors such as being a recruited athlete or affirmative action. One study of three selective private research universities in the United States showed the following effects (admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points on the new 1600-point scale):

Although it may initially appear that students of color are the most favored of all the groups in terms of college admissions, in practice, the widespread favoring of legacies has greatly reduced acceptance rates for black, Latino, and Asian-American applicants because the overwhelming majority of legacy students are white. According to a 2008 study, Duke's legacies are more likely to be white, Protestant, American citizens, and private high-school graduates than the overall student body. They are also significantly richer, with a familial income of $250,000 per year. In 2000-2001, of 567 alumni children attending Princeton, 10 were Latino and 4 were black. Similarly, a 2005 study reported that half the legacy applicants to selective colleges boasted family incomes in the top quartile of American earnings, compared to 29% of non-legacy students. In 2003, Texas A & M--which no longer practices legacy admissions—enrolled 312 white students and only 27 Latino and 6 black students who would not have been admitted if not for their family ties. When a large number of legacies are admitted to post-secondary institutions, the volume of admissions who are people of color or who are from working classes plummets. Since 1983, there have been formal complaints to The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that Asian-American applicants are being rejected in favor of students with lesser credentials.

In 1990, the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) determined that Harvard had admitted legacies at twice the rate of other applicants, that in several cases legacy status "'was the critical or decisive favor'" in a decision to admit an applicant, and that legacy preferences helped explained why 17.4% of white applicants were admitted but only 13.2% of Asian-American applicants during the previous decade. The OCR also found that legacies on average were rated lower than applicants who were neither legacies nor athletics in every important category (excluding athletic ability) in which applicants were judged. Legacy students as an overall pool of applicants routinely have poorer grades and lower SAT scores than the general pool of applicants for undergraduate admissions (athletes excepted).

In the 1990s, the University of California's Board of Regents voted to ban the use of affirmative action preferences throughout the system, and legacy privilege was abandoned across the University of California system soon after.

The Supreme Court upheld race-conscious admissions policies in its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, involving the University of Michigan's law school. With the judges having deep ties to their own elite post-secondary institutions, and with several being either former legacy students or the parents of legacies, the Court majority was not eager to ask the broader question regarding whether colleges were using race-conscious admissions policies to improve a problem of their own making, one arising from their legacy preferences and other admission practices that over-advantaged white students from economically privileged backgrounds. The only significant criticism of legacy preferences from the Court came from Justice Clarence Thomas, the sole member of the Supreme Court who grew up poor.

While the majority of Americans have been shown to strongly oppose legacy admissions, its beneficiaries hold key positions in Congress and the judiciary, protecting this practice from political and legal challenge.

Criticism

In 2008, alumni donations accounted for 27.5% of all donations to higher education in the U.S. In effect, in an era of steeply declining governmental funding to post-secondary education, universities and colleges feel forced to rely heavily on private donations from alumni for donations to fund university operations budgets and infrastructure. Hence, one way to curb legacy admissions preferences would be for federal and state governments to better fund post-secondary education.

Because private universities in U.S. rely heavily on donations from alumni, critics argue that legacy preferences are a way to indirectly sell university placement. Opponents accuse these programs of perpetuating an oligarchy and plutocracy as they lower the weight of academic merit in the admissions process in exchange for a financial one. Legacy students tend to be the white wealthy, contributing to socioeconomic injustices. Another criticism is that the wealthy are given an insurmountable advantage which hinders economic mobility within the society, in effect creating a de facto caste system.

Economically, while many schools say that a main reason for legacy preference is to increase donations, at an aggregate (school-wide) level the decision to prefer legacies has not been shown to increase donations. In fact, several institutions have demonstrated that they can do extremely well without legacy admissions, including MIT and Caltech. However, in some instances, while alumni donations may go up if a child is intending on applying, donations fall if that child is rejected.

Some supporters of the elimination of all non-academic preferences point out that many European universities, including highly selective institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, do not use legacy, or athletic preferences in admissions decisions.

There are also legal arguments against legacy preferences. In public schools, legacy preferences may violate the Nobility Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by creating a hereditary privilege and discriminating on the basis of ancestry. Legacy preferences in both public and private universities may be illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (now codified in Section 1981 of the U.S. Code).