Does Legacy Status Help Students or Create Barriers to Higher Education?
By Ilya Somin, Professor of Law, George Mason University, and Roderick Graham, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University
Universities Should Not Use Legacy Preferences for Admissions
By Ilya Somin – Professor of Law, George Mason University
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.
Legacy Preferences Can’t Be Justified
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. Like race, legacy preferences may sometimes be correlated with academic or other skills. But university admissions offices need not rely on such crude proxies when they can simply use direct measures of skills that interest them.
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.
It’s Time to End Legacy Preferences
Many of my fellow elite-college alumni are now in their peak-giving years. Few support legacy preferences and fewer still, if any, are likely to reduce their giving if their alma mater drops that policy. Polls indicate that 75 percent of Americans oppose legacy preferences, a figure comparable to the level of opposition to racial preferences. I doubt the opposition among elite-college graduates is significantly lower than that in the general public. The available evidence on this point is imperfect. But it should at least lead us to be skeptical of claims that ending legacy admissions will impoverish universities. American higher education can do without this form of hereditary privilege.
Preferences, Including Legacies, Help Colleges
By Roderick Graham – Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University
I support legacy preferences in college admissions because I support preference policies in general. These policies allow higher education institutions and their local communities to build a student body consistent with the institution’s history, mission, and values.
Admission Preferences Are Strategic Tools
It’s important to clarify how I understand preferences. One way is to see them as non-academic (often called arbitrary) advantages given to individuals. Another way is to view them as strategic choices institutions make to shape their student body. In this sense, legacy status is similar in function to preferences for students with strong athletic or artistic abilities.
When it comes to university admissions, the reasons for their preferences are diverse. For example, an elite liberal arts university in a rural, working-class area may end up attracting students from wealthy, urban cities. As part of an initiative to build connections with the community, the university can give preference to qualified applicants from the local area. A university in an area with a significant military presence may want to cultivate ties with a local army base and military families. Therefore, it gives preferential admission to qualified military-affiliated applicants. Or an elite, competitive university may find that the tight link between family income and test scores leads to increasingly economically homogenous student cohorts. To counteract this trend, they could give preferences to students whose family incomes fall below a threshold.
Legacy Status Protects All Students
Legacy preferences are just one of the many strategic tools higher education institutions should have available to them. I cannot advocate for the choice to use preferences for military-affiliated applicants in one context without also advocating for the choice to use legacy status in another. These preferences are necessary if these institutions want to act affirmatively to shape their student body in line with their history, mission, and values.
The question then arises: What is the rationale for legacy preferences? This is an important question that needs to be answered through the established governance processes within a given institution. The faculty, administrators, and community stakeholders should be making these decisions. But it is the freedom to build that rationale and implement the policy that I support.
The banning of racial preferences has set in motion a desire to ban legacy status. For those against racial and legacy preferences, logical consistency dictates that, eventually, preferences for other non-academic attributes must also be on the chopping block. Because legacies can fall within the general class of policies a university deploys to make its student body consonant with its history, mission, and values, I must support legacy status.
End Hereditary Privilege in Higher Education
By Ilya Somin – Professor of Law, George Mason University
Many thanks to Mr. Graham for his contribution to the debate, and his willingness to take on the difficult task of defending legacy preferences. Mr. Graham and I agree that selective college admissions must rely on preferences of some kind unless they are to admit students through a random lottery process. We even agree that some legitimate preferences may involve nonacademic considerations. But it doesn’t follow that all types of preferences are permissible. Some–including legacy preferences–are deeply unjust.
Mr. 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 Admissions Do Not Compensate for Past Injustices
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.
When I applied to college, I was the first in my family to do so in the United States. Today, my wife and I have degrees from multiple elite colleges and universities. I could argue that privileges for my kids are needed to compensate the family for the unfair disadvantage I once faced when I had to compete with others admitted through legacy preferences. But enough is enough. We cannot fix all the wrongs of the past, but we can at least stop perpetrating similar injustices in the future. The time has come to end hereditary privilege in higher education.
Allow Universities to Make Their Own Policy Decisions
By Roderick Graham – Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University
Mr. Somin and I both believe that preferences, including nonacademic preferences, are necessary for college admissions. However, he argues that it doesn’t then follow that all preferences are legitimate. In theory, I must concur. For example, is it legitimate for a university to give students from certain zip codes preference? At first, this seems nonsensical to me. What does where a student lived before enrollment have to do with their future admission into a university? The problem is that it is possible that the university has partnered with local companies to increase the number of industry-ready graduates, or that the university has identified an untapped pool of potential students in certain zip codes and wants to make inroads in those areas. Neither of these circumstances are guaranteed, but they are not impossible either.
In this sense, I am wary of central planning and prefer allowing individual institutions to make their own policy decisions. To be clear, I understand Mr. Somin’s argument–some preferences are understandable, while others are not. But who should make that decision? Should I, someone living in an urban area on the East Coast, decide what is legitimate for an institution in a rural, Midwestern city? I concede that an institution could manipulate a preference policy to prohibit a demographic from ever enrolling. However, if the past use of race, legacy, residency, or athletic preferences is an indication, then preferences do not lead to a homogenous student body. Instead, higher education institutions have used preferences to construct heterogeneous student bodies.
More Preferences Are Needed for Diverse Student Bodies
Indeed, more preferences in college admissions are necessary to address two growing problems on college campuses–decreasing intellectual diversity and, ironically, elite entrenchment on campus. In regard to intellectual diversity, a “diploma divide” has emerged in the United States. For several decades now, youth from liberal families have chosen to attend college more than those from conservative families. This has led to more politically homogenous student cohorts, especially on elite campuses. This homogeneity has contributed to a hostile climate for conservative ideas—something I have written about from personal experience. Similarly, family income is correlated with educational attainment. Thus, parents from affluent families dominate elite campuses. Not acting affirmatively to bring students from conservative or lower-income families onto college campuses means reproducing these same problematic cohorts in future generations.
So, while legacy status may not be the most appealing policy, I am compelled to support it. I am not inclined to decide what admissions decisions are legitimate for another institution or group of people. And most importantly, preferences are tools that bring the promise of higher education to more groups in our nation.
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Ilya Somin
Ilya Somin is a professor of law at George Mason University. He is the author of "Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom," "Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter," and "The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain." Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Atlantic, and USA Today. He is a regular contributor to the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine.
Roderick Graham
Roderick Graham is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University. His research focuses on cybercrime and the sociology of online deviance. He is also an active member in the American Association of University Professors.