Want a sure-fire way to increase your kid’s chances of being admitted into Princeton? Oops, too late: you didn’t go there. Now your kids face a 10% chance of admissions as opposed to 41.7% if you were an alumni. Shame on you for screwing over your kid’s future.

If you find that unfair to your kid, you’re not alone. There are currently two main camps on how college admissions should be run: a meritocracy that puts the numbers and accomplishments above all else, and a more “holistic” process that takes into account life experiences and circumstances to put the disadvantaged on more equal ground. Legacy admissions violate both of the above. It allows subpar students to get into colleges they otherwise don’t deserve to get in while favoring the already privileged and wealthy- and often white (let’s face it: most of the people who went to the Ivies in the 60’s and 70’s were white). It increases neither the academic profile nor the diversity of the school. The legacy students are more likely to make news for making tantrums and screwing up a Presidency than contribute to the university’s glory. It doesn’t contribute to the profile of the incoming class in any way, shape, or form.

It’s also unfair to almost everyone involved. It’s unfair to the African-American kid who’s been told that preferences due to his race are not legal, but preferences due to parents’ alma maters are. It’s unfair to the kid and his or her parents who busted their tails for the necessary statistics and resumes, then watch their less decorated classmates go to their dream college because their daddies and mommies went there and paid a “donation” for the privilege. It’s unfair to immigrants whose parents couldn’t go to the Ivies for geographical reasons. In short, it’s unfair to everyone but the silver spoons.

So if legacy admissions don’t make sense from a performance or fairness standpoint, why have them?

 Even admissions officers struggle to explain. Nothing underscores the pointlessness of legacies more than their pathetic attempts to justify it. Some say the children of alumni are just more likely to be qualified due to their upbringing (so much for equality in admissions), and more honest officers say that it tends to boost alumni donations to the university’s endowment fund. Some apologetics- when you have them, you also have a problem- try to say it’s only a modest tip in favor of legacies.

As Inside Higher Ed points out, what if none of that is true? The article debunks each and every one of the points mentioned above. Children of alumni are not more likely to be qualified; alumni giving is not correlated with the existence of legacy admissions, and as for the “modest” tip- well, just read my first paragraph.

But the best argument against legacy admissions comes from America’s ancestral forefathers. They wrote the Declaration of Independence in order to get away from the English political and social structure that allowed for an elite class unaccountable and unreachable to the masses. America was founded as a place where everyone had an equal chance of “making it.” If the most significant thing you can do to get into Harvard or Princeton was to be born to alumni parents, whether that spirit lives on should be put into question. The Ivy League’s legacy admissions are doing what we ran away from Europe for: perpetuating an elite class at the expense of more qualified commoners. All you have to do is replace “duke” and “count” with “billionaire” and “celebrity”, and we might as well put the elite families back into their castles, with the rest of us on the outside looking across the moat of college admissions.


(Photo: Bert K)