A Response to Supporters of Legacy Preferences

On Wednesday, the Century Foundation released a book I edited, entitled Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions, at a forum at the National Press Club. (Video from the discussion can be found here). Write-ups of the book and the forum appeared online in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Inside Higher Education, Education Week, and CBS Moneywatch.  Key points from the book also appeared in an article I wrote for The Chronicle, entitled, “10 Myths About Legacy Preferences in College Admissions.”

I’ve been struck by the responses at the forum and among comments from readers of the Chronicle, the Times, and elsewhere. Most people didn’t really defend the idea of admitting students based on lineage—an un-American idea if there ever was one—but rather, two concerns stood out: What’s the big deal? And might the elimination of legacy preferences hurt affirmative action? My responses are below.

1. What’s the Big Deal? Bumped Kids Will Do Fine.

At the National Press Club forum, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University, argued that if a student is bumped from a certain school because someone else receives a legacy preference, she’ll just go to another school a rung further down the ladder. No big deal. This is largely a “symbolic” issue, he said.

Trachtenberg is a friend and mentor of mine, but on this issue I think he’s wrong. As I noted in Myth # 9, research finds that where one goes to college matters, in terms of the resources available to a student, her likelihood of graduating, her future earnings, and the chances of her entry into the leadership class.

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized the importance of this last point when it held that abolishing affirmative action would be troublesome, even if it only meant that African-American and Latino students went down a tier among colleges and universities because our nation’s leaders disproportionately come from the most selective schools. (The Court members should know, now that they are made up entirely of individuals who attended Harvard and Yale Law Schools.)

Even assuming the issue were merely symbolic—which it is not—are legacy preferences the kind of signal we want to send to students? No matter how hard you work in high school, we’re going to give the equivalent of 160 SAT points to other kids based on the fact that their parents attended a particular school that your parents didn’t?

2. What’s the Big Deal? Not Many Students Are Involved.

Along the same lines, a number of readers of The Chronicle‘s “10 Myths” piece questioned whether many students are in fact affected by legacy preferences, implying the number may be very small.

What proportion of students are affected? It’s hard to give a precise figure, in part because legacy preferences are shrouded in secrecy, and universities want to keep it that way, strenuously resisting any reporting requirements. But here is what we do know: Legacies constitute 10-25% of students at many colleges and universities, usually more than the number of under-represented minorities. How many alumni children would have gotten in anyway? We can’t be sure, but as one comparison, at Caltech, where no legacies are provided, only 1.5% of students are the children of alumni.    
    
Logically, we know that given the competitiveness of admissions, many legacies wouldn’t be there but for the legacy preference, because those programs on average increase one’s odds of getting in by 20 percentage points, holding grades and test scores constant. At the forum, Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle (and a contributor to Affirmative Action for the Rich), pointed to a study conducted by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose that found that white students who had low scores and got in based on a variety of preferences constitute 15% of the student population at the most selective 146 institutions. By contrast, black and Hispanic students who benefitted from affirmative action constitute roughly 8% of students on these campuses. Michael Dannenberg, who is now Senior Advisor and Counsel to the Under Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, testified in 2006 that “There are more white students admitted to top ten universities after having benefited from legacy preferences than African-American or Latino students admitted after having benefited from affirmtive action policies.”

3. Would Eliminating Legacies Hurt Affirmative Action?

At the Press Club forum, Barbara Bergmann, a professor emeritus at American University and author of In Defense of Affirmative Action, said she worried that if legacy preferences fell, it could hurt affirmative-action programs. In debates, she noted, it is useful for supporters of affirmative action to cite legacy preferences to expose the hypocrisy of those who claim to support merit in admissions.  Eliminate legacy preferences and you eliminate the debating point.

This seems a rather weak reed upon which to justify the continuation of ancestry-based discrimination that disproportionately hurts black and Latino and poor students. And, as I point out in Myth #5, the justifications for affirmative action is entirely different than that for legacy preferences and will stand or fall on their own.

Do readers who support legacy preferences have stronger arguments to make?