College admissions policies favor legacies

Thursday, April 9, 1998

College admissions policies favor legacies

ADMISSIONS: To sustain diversity, more must be fixed than just
Prop. 209

By Charles Sisk

Columbia Daily Spectator

Even though I consider myself a libertarian, I stoutly believe
admissions policies that favor underrepresented minorities are the
only way universities can achieve anything closely resembling
diversity. Racial bias in standardized tests, as well as
socioeconomic factors, are usually cited as the reasons for why
schools cannot achieve diversity. However, debates tend to ignore
one major factor: admissions policies that give the children of
previous graduates special consideration. These "legacy
preferences" often favor some white and Asian-American applicants
at the expense of other, equally-qualified students.

Legacy preferences have an ignominious past. They were invented
in the ’20s by Ivy League institutions concerned with rising
numbers of Jewish students, who managed to get admitted through the
schools’ increased reliance on standardized tests.

Since it was not easy for admissions officers to figure out
whether a person was Jewish, universities found another way: They
could favor the sons of previous graduates and virtually lock out
"undesirables," like African Americans, Jews and poor whites.

American universities no longer have such goals, but legacy
preference is still an important criterion since most colleges ask
applicants to list previous family members who have attended.
Universities argue that admitting multiple generations leads to
stronger loyalties, which improves educational quality. While this
may be true to some extent, the best way for schools to encourage
loyalty is to give people new opportunities, and the best way for
them to improve educational quality is to admit the best
students.

This forces an important question: Are the children of alumni
significantly less qualified? In his book "The Next American
Nation," journalist Michael Lind reports that, at one Ivy League
school, the average SAT score for legacy enrollees is 1280, whereas
the overall average SAT score for an entering class is 1350. When
one considers that Ivy League schools reserve up to one-fifth of
their slots for legacy enrollment, this discrepancy of 70 points is
very large.

Legacy preferences work against non-white and non-Asian-American
applicants the most, since these are the groups that have
traditionally been locked out of prestigious universities.
According to an estimate in a 1991 article by John Larew in the
Washington Monthly, Harvard would not have admitted 200 children of
alumni in 1992 if it had evaluated them on the same criteria as the
rest of its applicants. By comparison, that year Harvard admitted
fewer than 200 African American, Mexican American, Native American
and Puerto Rican students combined.

Last week, the University of California released figures that
show a sharp decline in the number of African American, Native
American and Latino students admitted to its more prestigious
campuses. At Berkeley, only 10.4 percent of the students accepted
this year come from these three groups, whereas 23.1 percent were
accepted last year. At UCLA, the drop was from 19.8 percent in 1997
to 12.7 percent in 1998.

The reason is the passage of Proposition 209, which prohibits
California universities from considering race when making
admissions decisions. We should not write off Proposition 209 as a
West Coast political controversy because this will have
repercussions in the East down the road. If ending programs for
minorities can have such a negative effect in a system that
slightly considers legacy, Ivy League institutions should be
concerned about the affect such a decision would have here.

Columbia has not announced plans to implement anything similar
to Proposition 209, but it may not be long before a nationwide
proposal is put before Congress. Texas has already passed something
akin to Proposition 209, though it cannot be enacted until it
clears the Federal appeals process. Several states, including
Michigan, are also considering initiatives.

California, Texas and Michigan have three of the top university
systems in the country. Just as the rest of the nation’s
universities followed the Ivy League’s lead 70 years ago in
enacting legacy preferences to lock out minorities, other state
systems will follow if the major public universities wipe out
racial considerations.

One day, ending race-based decisions may not be a problem. But
that day is one in which underrepresented minorities do not face
other significant barriers to enrollment. By themselves,
universities cannot do much to solve inadequately-funded school
systems or biases in standardized testing, but they can do
something about legacy enrollment, which is little more than a
vestige of more aristocratic times.