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Debating Legacy Preferences in College Admissions
Sociologist Roderick Graham and I debated this issue at the Divided We Fall website.
Legacy preferences in college admissions have come under increasing criticism in recent years, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision curbing the use of racial preferences in SFFA v. Harvard, last year. Sociologist Roderick Graham and I recently debated this issue at the Divided We Fall website, which hosts debates on various public policy issues.
I opposed legacy preferences, while Prof. Graham defended them. I appreciate Graham's willingness to take on the difficult task of defending this increasingly unpopular policy. I hold various unpopular views, myself, and know it isn't always easy for speak out for such things. Nonetheless, I wasn't persuaded by his points.
Here's an excerpt from my intro statement:
I rarely agree with Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she was right to denounce legacy preferences in college admissions as "affirmative action for the privileged." They are unjust for much the same reasons as racial and ethnic preferences are. In both cases, some applicants are rewarded, while others are punished for arbitrary circumstances of ancestry that they have no control over. These preferences have no connection to academic ability or other skills that might make them better students or better members of the university community. The fact that your parents are Black, White, or Hispanic says nothing about how good an applicant you are. And the same goes for whether or not your parents went to Harvard….
In some ways, legacy preferences are worse than racial preferences for historically disadvantaged minority groups. The former cannot be defended on the rationale that they are somehow making up for historic injustices. They also cannot be justified on the grounds that they promote "diversity"–the rationale the U.S. Supreme Court rightly rejected last year as justification for racial preferences. Scions of elite-college graduates are neither a historically oppressed minority nor a source of educationally-valuable diversity….
The usual rationale for legacy preferences is that they increase alumni donations. This might be a defensible argument for profit-making institutions whose primary goal is to make money. But most universities are public or nonprofit institutions that—at least in principle—are supposed to prioritize other objectives, such as promoting education and research. Legacy preferences are obviously inimical to those goals. Moreover, it isn't even clear that legacy status actually increases donations significantly. Several elite schools, such as Johns Hopkins, MIT, and my undergrad alma mater Amherst College, have recently abolished legacy preferences with few, if any, ill effects.
And here's an excerpt from my response to Graham:
Graham is wrong to analogize legacy preferences to "preferences for students with strong athletic or artistic abilities." Athletic and artistic abilities are valuable skills. By contrast, legacy status is an arbitrary circumstance of birth, like race or ethnicity. Being the scion of an alum does not indicate that you are a good student or have a valuable skill to contribute to the university community. Being the child of an elite-college graduate may be correlated with academic ability, just as being the son of an NBA player may be correlated with basketball ability. But schools need not rely on such crude correlations based on ancestry when they have access to direct measurements of the relevant skills, such as grades and test scores for academic ability and high school sports records for athletic talent….
Legacy preferences are even less defensible than racial and ethnic preferences for historically disadvantaged groups, such as Black or Native American people. The former can be defended on the grounds that they compensate for historic injustices or promote "diversity." These rationales have serious flaws, and I reject them, but they are at least plausible. By contrast, no one can argue that the children of elite-college alumni are an oppressed minority. Nor are schools likely to suffer from a shortage of the "diverse" perspectives provided by such students. Selective colleges will have plenty of legacies in the student body, even without preferences.
There is also a rejoinder by Prof. Graham, which follows my response.
Interestingly, Graham's argument for legacy preferences isn't really an argument for legacy preferences, at all. He doesn't even make the standard argument that they increase alumni donations.
Graham's arguments are actually defenses of other nonacademic admissions criteria. For example, in his rejoinder, he argues that schools should use admissions preferences to promote ideological diversity (increasing the percentage of conservative students) and socioeconomic diversity (increasing the percentage of students from relatively poor families). I have great skepticism about the desirability of ideological preferences in admissions, and would use socioeconomic ones only to a very limited degree, in order to avoid "mismatch" problems of the kind that also bedevil preferences. But even if these types of preferences are justified, they are not the same thing as legacy preferences. The latter don't help relatively poor applicants (quite the opposite, in fact!) and there is little reason to think they will contribute to ideological diversity.
I have previously written about legacy preferences and the issues they raise here and here.
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I believe that carefully managed (probably as a cultural push rather than a quota or anything) ideological diversity in *hiring* is a good idea.
Ideological diversity in admissions seems putting the cart before the horse.
I would argue that legacy admissions serve to preserve a school’s culture between generations. Even things like attire — students at different institutions dress differently.
All of the things that Thomas Jefferson opposed when he was arguing for the admission of “foreign” (out of state) students at UVA.
I would argue that legacy admissions serve to preserve a school’s culture
IOW you attempt to throw any argument you can find in favour of legacy admissions regardless of how fatuous.
IOW you have n logic to rebut with and resort to insults.
How honest of you.
Going to bat for Ed’s school culture thesis?
Prof. Graham sounded like a student assigned to “craft the best argument you can for this position,” not like someone who genuinely believed what he had written.
(Why doesn’t the Divided We Fall organization identify its personnel and funders?)
I agree. His arguments are weak and lame.
Then they should be easy to refute, rather than just assert someone should.
There are better arguments for legacy admissions.
The people who are vocal about abolishing legacy preferences do so for one reason: as revenge for the rightful abolishing of racial preferences. And by the way – why are faculty/administration preferences never discussed? Maybe because of all the minority faculty and administration parents taking advantage of it?
So you think Prof. Somin was a big affirmative action guy, then?
*shrug* Legacy preferences are affirmative action for white people.
But then again, see my comment below.
*shrug* Legacy preferences are affirmative action for white people.
How so?
Of course you could accept applicants based on the content of their character, Test Scores, Grades, Bench Press or Vertical Leap depending on what major they’re planning on. Maybe give some preference to those who served their country first.
Graham is wrong to analogize legacy preferences to “preferences for students with strong athletic or artistic abilities.” Athletic and artistic abilities are valuable skills.
Are they? Admitting student athletes who lack the academic ability to get admitted seems wrong just like any other admission decision that’s not based on academic ability is wrong. We might disagree on how to measure (or even define) academic ability, but whether your parents attended the same university or whether you’re good at sports isn’t it.
If someone is there to be on an athletic team or to study art why is that not enough, as long as they have basic grades for entrance. Do we care about math ability from English majors or ability to analyze a poem by a mechanical engineer such that we must treat math and english testing and grades as identical when looking at applicants for those programs? It’s not unsusual at all for things that require specialized skill to look at that and give it a bump over other general things.
You are looking at sports as separate from the university, but there is no reason for that. They are teaching kids a skill just as other classes are. For some to even make a career out of it. That athletics also is important for revenue through many different sources (ticket sales, endorsements, donations, etc) also makes sports a valuable part of the university. Many universities, I believe around 1/3, even have physical education requirements because their pedagogical belief is that it is important to a well rounded individual, and actuall helps in students ability to learn.
Universities also generally look favorably on group extra curriculars whether clubs or sports for what that brings to the university community and is something that tends to point to better academic outcomes. So I don’t know why you are trying to equate it to legacy which literally has nothing to do with the individual him/herself.
Somin claims to be a Libertarian, but nearly everything he posts is anti-freedom, and anti-American.
Welcome to Reason – – – – – – – –
Libertarianism is irrelevant since the debate addressed propriety, or perhaps morality, not legality. That said, the availability of tax deductions for contributions to elite educational institutions whose admissions standards favor alums and other supporters is dubious public policy. Libertarianism would neither punish nor subsidize such institutions.
1. Getting rid of legacy admissions isn’t anti-freedom
2. His big things are immigration and zoning both of which he takes positions that are generally libertarian. It isn’t a monolith, but he is hardly outside mainstream libertarianism and is probably in the majority.
3. Libertarianism isn’t about being pro or anti american. In fact most things that are claimed to be pro-American are about protectionist and nativist policies that are decidedly no libertarian, and the vice versa for anti-American claims
I don’t think you know what libertarianism is
Somin is about punishing his political enemies. He’s pro immigration until you bus people to MV and then he’s all for military force to move them out. His stance on the vaccine was definitely anti-liberty or freedom but please, keep white knighting for the leftie.
I assume we’re talking about private colleges rather than public ones, since the latter are enmeshed with various legal restrictions and questions of public policy.
Proceeding on my assumption, missing from Prof Somin’s chatter is any acknowlegement of the college’s own interests. A college’s policy on legacy admissions, or the color of the walls in its own lecture rooms are its own business. Its interests duke it out with the interests of its customers (inc students) , and suppliers (inc faculty) under the ordinary principles of voluntary association. Don’t like the menu – go elsewhere.
As to the question of whether legacy preferences are in fact in the interests of any particular college, I found this splendidly daft :
“The usual rationale for legacy preferences is that they increase alumni donations. This might be a defensible argument for profit-making institutions whose primary goal is to make money. But most universities are public or nonprofit institutions that—at least in principle—are supposed to prioritize other objectives, such as promoting education and research. Legacy preferences are obviously inimical to those goals. ”
I find the time I spend at work, seriously cuts into my vacations. It is inimical to my goals of having a good and comfortable time for me and my family.
Good point. Colleges have multiple goals, of course. One is to keep the alumni happy. They can do that, consistent with other goals.
Somin says some colleges have abolished legacy admissions, and maybe no longer try to make alumni happy. Will those colleges suffer as a result? It will take a while to find out.
Exactly. A college has goals that involve preserving it as an institution: culturally, economically, and academically (in no particular order).
It’s possible that over time – a generation or two – colleges that abolish legacy preferences will see changes in alumni giving. It’s possible that colleges are losing smaller dollar but frequent donors, and that effect is swamped out by the eight-to-ten figure donations given by extremely wealthy people.
Many top private colleges explicitly want kids who want to be there. Legacy kids often feel a stronger connection to the university than their non-legacy counterparts. Especially if their parents are active alumni, they have been going to homecoming games since toddlerhood. Their parents gave them onesies with the school mascot. After graduation, they tend to donate and volunteer at a higher rate than their non-legacy counterparts.
Of course, whenever you’re talking admissions, the question is the size of the preference and who gets rejected to let the preferred kid in. It’s my understanding that legacies basically bump out wealthy non-legacy suburban kids, not first gen kids from rural Appalachia or inner city Baltimore. So Dartmouth would be, hypothetically, taking the offspring of a Dartmouth alumnus instead of the offspring of a Brown, Georgetown, or Northwestern alum. Maybe bad for the kids whose parents went to non name State and became very successful.
“The usual rationale for legacy preferences is that they increase alumni donations. This might be a defensible argument for profit-making institutions whose primary goal is to make money. But most universities are public or nonprofit institutions that—at least in principle—are supposed to prioritize other objectives, such as promoting education and research. Legacy preferences are obviously inimical to those goals. ”
I think Somin misses the point of this particular argument. One could – could – argue that increased donations make it possible for the university to provide more financial aid to students they want to enroll, but who cannot afford the tab.
Of course, as so often this is really a pointless discussion without some actual data.
Do legacy preferences actually meaningfully increase donations? Somin says no, or at least “not proven.”
Even if they do, how is that extra money spent? More lower-middle income students, or more money spent on athletics or administrators or unnecessarily expensive buildings?
Granting all that, how do legacy admissions affect the culture of the university, not just politically, but in all aspects of student life? Legacy admissions by and large come from upper-middle to upper to 1%er class families. Can there be so many of those that the kind of political/socioeconimic/ideological/cultural diversity conservatives claim to value is discouraged?
Or the country, for that matter? Do they help to create class stratification?
Not sure I buy everything here.
By what measure are athletic skills valuable? Keeping active is important for a healthy lifestyle, but you don’t need particularly good skills for that. Elite athletic skills are not particularly valuable in the sense that they will provide a reliable income for the players; maybe 2 Harvard students per year will go on to play in a major sports league. They do not improve education and research, which you say should be the priority. They may increase donations, but you say that’s not important.
No-one has yet refuted the basic point that they’re affirmative action for the privileged.
How do you imagine anyone could refute such a subjective assertion?
What would it take to change your mind?
Well one might begin by suggesting that as an affirmative action program for the privileged it’s woefully under inclusive.
If X College has legacy preferences that excludes the vast majority of privileged children whose parents did not go to X college, but who went to A to W College or no college at all. Not to mention Z college.
An efficient affirmative action program for the privileged would look quite different. It would focus on how privileged the wannabe students were, rather than whether they were children of alumni. You could greatly increase the privilege scores of new students by winnowing out those children of alumni who aren’t very privileged (because the parents never succeeded at anything) making space for super privileged children of non alumni whose parents made it big.
It wouldn’t take much more than 20 minutes to design an affirmative action scheme for the privileged that was three or four times as efficient as legacy admissions.
Starting with a straightforward pay to play.
I love the assumption here that everyone who has a parent that attended college is “privileged”. Even back in the 70’s, when I went to the same college my father had, that was hardly true: He was a machinist, for goodness sake! The pinnacle of privilege.
Today, when better than half the population is going to college? That’s a pretty dubious claim.
Compared to those who are first in their families to go to college yeah there is privilege there.
At least it has fuck all and jack shit to do with skin color.
“But most universities are public or nonprofit institutions that—at least in principle—are supposed to prioritize other objectives, such as promoting education and research.”
Legacy preferences should be found unconstitutional at public universities for the same reason race preferences are. Private schools, of course, can do what they want, as long as they follow the law. And the law, as I understand it, prohibits race preferences but not legacy preferences.
Well, under present constitutional jurisprudence, a status based upon where mommy or daddy went to college is evaluated quite differently (rational basis) as opposed to a status based on race (strict scrutiny).
Did I miss it? What justification did Professor offer for favoring athletes?
Did he see nothing wrong behind the Varsity Blue scandals at USC, Georgetown and other sought after admissions slots, other than that the schools got bamboozled by admits who weren’t what they were advertised to be?
We are Harvard (pronouns: dumb/dumber/dumbest). Nobody comes here to get a good education–we’re not in that business. We’re in the connections business. Come to Harvard and get good connections that will help you professionally and socially.
We must have legacy admissions, for these are the connections that we’re selling. For us to abandon legacy admissions would be equivalent to a table factory no longer buying wood.
Bingo
On target!
I have for many years considered legacy admissions nothing other than academic nepotism. Now nepotism is often seen in family owned and operated businesses and generally considered semi-acceptable in that context, but with the exception of a few private, for profit colleges, there are really no family owned and operated colleges and universities. In my view, the the legacy admissions are nothing other that an attempt by the “elites” to continue their family status as an elite an should be denounced as rewards for nothing.
“ow nepotism is often seen in family owned and operated businesses and generally considered semi-acceptable in that context,”
Just semi-acceptable? Really? I suppose other forms of inheritance are only semi-acceptable, too?
Nepotism in the workplace can result in Junior running an organization into the ground, not always, but often enough. Those of us who work in the real world, know of and have often seen nepotism and its effects on organizations.
It can, yes, and yet the transition from family management to ‘professional’ management is a high point of mortality for small businesses, because management ‘professionals’ have no personal stake in the business actually surviving. That was the point at which my first employer out of college foundered, after the owner’s son he’d been grooming to take over died in a plane crash, and the guy needed to retire anyway due to his age. The professional they hired just ran it into the ground and moved on.
The decisive point, though, is that the family owned business is the family’s own property, and people are entitled to be partial with their own property.
So, ‘semi-acceptable’? Yeah, in the sense that there are clowns who object to people getting to pass on their property to their heirs, but such people aren’t common enough to justify that “semi”. Everything’s “semi-” if you take those sorts of outlier views seriously.
You can judge people for doing something that they have a right to do.
Legal does not mean moral.
Case in point: the anti-Israel protests in college campi.
Yes. The protesters’ cause is moral but their method not necessarily legal.
The decisive point, though, is that the family owned business is the family’s own property, and people are entitled to be partial with their own property.
True.
In practice lots of families which own businesses are not quite so bottom line, option-grant metric, orientated as businesses run by professional managers.
Things like “we like to do it this way because we always have”, reciprocal loyalty to a loyal workforce (ditto suppliers, customers) and “we love our home town” figure larger with family owned businesses – on average – than publicly owned ones.
The big business corporate model is quite a good system for weeding human factors* out of business decisions, and also for allowing the kind of person who can see past the humans to the numbers to rise to the top. Which is not to say that after appropriate PR research, such folk cannot pretend to care about their employees, company home town, loyal customers etc. So long as the metrics justify the performance.
* human factors excluding pay and promotion prospects for the managers themselves that is
PS I see that Sarcastro has said something I agree with. I will look out for a blue moon this evening.
I think they’re just trying to build a base of hopefully influential people who are personally loyal to the institution, rather than treating it as an interchangeable supplier of educational services. And who will then defend the institution’s interests out there in the world.
The value of that to the institution seems obvious. The value to greater society less so.
Thoughts-
1. I recently heard something that made me think about affirmative action in general. Basically, the conclusion was that meta-studies of AA have shown that (1) AA can be helpful in putting people in positions that will help them make connections and get into positions that they should be able to have, but would otherwise be prevented from having; but (2) AA has bad effects on the recipients if it is known that the place has AA (because it is stressful to everyone there, as they won’t know if they benefitted, and people will assume that they weren’t qualified, even if they were). So … it’s rough. As always, I would prefer that we get rid of AA, and tackle the issue by addressing the inequalities earlier.
2. “Merit” is a slippery concept. As is well-known, Ivies de-emphasized test scores and moved to a more “holistic” determination of merit a century ago because test scores alone were letting too many Jewish people in. The standards of merit will always change to preserve the ability of those with power to get their own kids into good schools.
3. As someone who had to just navigate the “legacy” process, I can understand the attraction and drawbacks. When your progeny doesn’t get in (or gets some kind of runaround, deferred kind of thing) at your alma, you get pissed. In the end, it worked out for the best because another similar place offered substantial merit-based aid, which made it a no-brainer (seriously, have you look at college prices recently????). But it’s going to be a while before I give any money, because I’m a petty person.
Which I guess goes to show you, we all have principles in the abstract. And I think we should get rid of legacy admissions. But I was pretty annoyed that while we had an unfair system, it didn’t work for my own benefit. Oh well, I guess I am not that enlightened, yet.
“Merit” is a slippery concept. As is well-known, Ivies de-emphasized test scores and moved to a more “holistic” determination of merit a century ago because test scores alone were letting too many Jewish people in. The standards of merit will always change to preserve the ability of those with power to get their own kids into good schools.
I take this in the spirit in which it is intended – deeply lokistical (which is French for cynical.)
But obvously the actual point of this anecdote is that the Ivies appreciated that their merit tests did in fact identify merit and they didn’t like the result. The same thing is obviously behind the current flight from SAT – colleges know that they are significantly predictive, but cannot abide the result.
In short “merit” is capable of being measured with pretty good accuracy – that is to say that a sensible realistc merit assessment can predict academic (and life) performance reasonably well – but that doesn’t mean we are all going to like the answers that such measurements throw up.
For the avoidance of doubt “predict” just means predict to a standard of statistical significance, not perfectly. And I do not mean merit in the sense of just desert.
It was meant to be cynical. 😉
That said, I do think that the following two statements can be true-
1. There is, in fact, something to be said for “merit.” If you have a kid who has played youth sports, for example, you will, at some point, see some youth who clearly has “it” to an extent the other kids don’t. Or a kid who has some facility with other areas (whether its math, reading, art, music, whatever). Ability and work matter. And we should reward that.
2. On the other hand, “merit” is also a slippery concept, especially when you are trying to determine who is the “best” among one of many great candidates. This is true regardless of whether you’re looking at college applicants to a selective school, or an appointment to the Supreme Court.
(All that said, I think that many of the schools that moved away from using any objective indicator, such as standardized tests, have regretted that decision, and it is my understanding that there is now a movement to bring them back. While I don’t think standardized tests are the end-all, be-all of “merit,” I think that they are a necessary evil at this point, and actually help many kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds by both showing that they have the ability, and also because those kids don’t have the time and money to load up on the millions of extracurriculars that colleges demand.)
I think I broadly agree.
1. There are obviously complications in defining what you think is “best” – eg likely to do very well in final exams, likely to get a top job, likley to do well in that top job and so on. Obviously the more remote from collge that your “success” metric is, the more confounding factors will intrude in your assessment of how much the attendance at college influenced the student’s eventual success.
2. As you described with your sporting example, merit in terms of current ability incorporates both natural talent, and trained expertise. The same goes for potential. Two people who have equal natural talent for say basketball, will have neither equal skill at age 18, not equal potential at age 18, if one has been playing and practising since childhood and the other has only just taken up the sport. After a while, the ship has sailed. Thus putting a thumb on the scale for those whose tests scores are a bit lower to take account of their prior disadvantages is fine. But it is necessary not to overcorrect. Measuring how much to aim off is not easy. Not impossible but not easy.
3. Success is only partly correlated with natural talent (which we can call IQ, but it might just as well be artistic talent or sporting talent, or whatever.) Also highly relevant is conscientiousness. And conscientiousness is notoriously difficult to measure, except ex post facto.
4. In the context of college, there is the particular confounding factor of the transition from childhood, where a lack of self discipline can be masked by the availability of externally imposed discipline from parents (and to some extent school.) Some of those who shine in entrance tests, because they have some ability but have not had to supply their own discipline n childhood, will fall back in college relative to those who are naturally self disciplined, or who have learned to be in childhood.
So things like SAT scores do not measure everything that needs to be measured in order to better predict success.