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The Atlantic
The Easiest Reform for College Admissions
Many admissions issues are complicated, but preferences for the children of alumni are indefensible.
Natasha Warikoo
January 29, 2020
In the world of college admissions, few choices about how to weigh
applicants are simple. How much weight should schools give to
applicants’ athletic performance, to standardized-test scores, to the
need for a diverse student body, to the donations of wealthy
benefactors? These are all complicated questions. But Johns Hopkins
University just presented the higher-education world with at least one
easy decision: Legacy admissions need to go.
Johns Hopkins recently made public a decision, reached in 2014 but kept
secret until recently, to stop giving an admissions boost to applicants
who have a parent who attended Johns Hopkins. Giving weight to legacy
status takes attention away from consideration of an applicant’s
accomplishments, raw talent, leadership ability, academic achievement,
and athletic skills. And it does that without offering much in return:
It doesn’t measure the obstacles that a student has overcome, or her
potential to contribute to peers’ learning, or any other
characteristics that colleges sometimes consider. Nor does a broad
legacy-admissions preference guarantee that alumni will donate to an
institution in any meaningful way—despite the widespread and
often-unquestioned assumption that it will. (The students who might
have been admitted if not for legacy preferences are potential donors,
too.)
The strongest legacy applicants will be admitted anyway; they make up
about 3.5 percent of the current freshman class at Johns Hopkins, down
from about 12.5 percent several years ago. But reducing the number of
legacies makes room in a college class for top students from all
backgrounds; the percentage of students who are eligible for Pell
Grants at the school has more than doubled during the same period.
Johns Hopkins’s experience since eliminating legacy admissions
undercuts other colleges’ claims that they are engines of social
mobility, that they select the very best candidates from their deep
pool of applicants, and that the admissions process is fundamentally
meritocratic.
Legacy admissions do not rise to the level of the Varsity Blues
celebrity scandal, in which dozens of wealthy parents paid big dollars
to a private consultant to enable their children to cheat on the SAT
and to bribe coaches to claim that their children were needed on sports
teams. However, they represent different versions of the same problem:
a special admissions door for applicants who have already enjoyed major
advantages in life.
The irony is that the legacy-admissions preference, a policy supported
only by a vague notion that catering to long-ago graduates is in an
institution’s long-term interest, has survived at elite institutions,
while affirmative action now faces existential threats. A policy in
which black, Latino, and Native American applicants can get a small
boost in admissions has multiple important justifications supporting
it. Universities and their students welcome its impact on campus life
and interracial dialogue. Others view affirmative action as a policy to
extend opportunity to groups historically underrepresented on
elite-college campuses, or even as a form of reparations for past
exclusion. Finally, affirmative action diversifies the pool of
potential leaders in society, so that our politicians, judges,
executives, and teachers might better reflect the society they serve.
Yet affirmative action has been under sustained political and legal
attack for decades. Opinion polls since the 1960s have continually
asked ordinary Americans for their views on the subject, and
politicians have exploited it for political advantage. Some will recall
President Bill Clinton’s charge to “mend it, [not] end it.” Multiple
states have had public referenda leading to bans on affirmative action
in college admissions. A case now working its way through the courts
could extinguish the practice entirely. Why aren’t legacy admissions in
similar peril?
American colleges and universities are coy about acknowledging the
moral trade-offs that they obviously make. While prosecutors say that
the money the former sitcom star Lori Loughlin spent to ensure her
daughter’s acceptance at the University of Southern California broke
the law, the $2.5 million that Jared Kushner’s parents spent to ensure
his admission to Harvard despite Kushner’s mediocre performance in high
school was fully legal. This policy of essentially selling seats
further compromises universities’ claims of fairness in admissions.
At the same time, universities seem to rely on these large donations,
and even people outside a school’s fundraising office are capable of
viewing these transactions in relentlessly utilitarian terms. When my
research team interviewed students on Ivy League campuses for my book
The Diversity Bargain, many students suggested this compromise: If one
legacy admission meant the university could pay for five packages of
financial aid for disadvantaged students, it was worth it. One
executive at the Harvard Management Company has even suggested that
colleges simply auction a small number of seats to the highest bidders,
which would eliminate the need for the more subtle admissions boosts
given to a much larger group of legacy applicants and the children of
donors.
Personally, I believe that admissions boosts for the children of donors
need to end. But those of us who favor such a change must acknowledge
that universities would need to find a solution to the financial burden
this may cause—there is some reason to pause before considering an end
to this practice, unlike legacy admissions.
Not much in college admissions is simple. Because the high schools from
which applicants come differ markedly in their rigor and in their
grading systems, many colleges use SAT scores to compare applicants—and
scoring patterns on that standardized test have been used as an
argument against affirmative action and legacy admissions alike. But
the SAT, too, is a flawed yardstick. Scores on the test are highly
correlated with household income and parental education, yet not very
well correlated with actual academic performance in college. These
problems have led to a growing movement of selective colleges that are
scrapping the SAT requirement, going SAT-optional. The University of
Chicago is the latest to do so. A lawsuit in California is even arguing
that the use of the SAT in admission to University of California
campuses is unlawful, because it introduces bias against poor, black,
and Latino applicants.
Selective colleges have multiple goals in mind when they admit
students. Compromises need to be made and then justified to families,
alumni, lawyers, and a range of constituencies on campus—faculty,
coaches, the development office, and more. Universities need to make
sure they remain financially sound, to ensure that the students
admitted have the academic skills necessary to thrive on campus, to
promote a more diverse leadership for American democracy, and much
more. Why expend any energy or moral capital on defending an
indefensible policy like legacy admissions? All selective colleges
should follow Johns Hopkins’s lead.
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