Conservatives rightfully criticize race-based Affirmative Action policies. But with a new report exposing the prevalence and injustice of athletic and legacy-based admissions at top universities like Harvard, it’s time we add legacy admissions as a target of our outrage, too.
An academic paper titled “Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard” examined the prevalence and implications of legacy-based admissions. As Robert VerBruggen makes clear in his analysis of the paper for National Review, legacy admissions pose a bigger problem than we may have realized and they essentially amount to Affirmative Action for rich white people.
The paper categorized “ALDC” students as those who receive admission preferences “for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff.” Essentially, these students gain admission not on the basis of academic merit. Researchers found that roughly 3 in 4 of white ALDC students “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDC,” and that ALDC status recipients were disproportionately white.
The unfairness on display in Harvard’s admissions policies is astounding. These students largely come from extremely privileged backgrounds, but admissions officers are handing them a golden ticket to the #1 university in the country on the basis of who their parents are, how much their parents can donate, or how well they can dribble a basketball.
Conservatives oppose Affirmative Action for its unfair tipping of the scales, but as VerBruggen notes, these kinds of legacy admissions are even worse. He writes:
And this isn’t some rare phenomena, just affecting a few students in and around the margins. According to VerBruggen’s calculations, “about 30% of students admitted to Harvard are ALDCs.” Think about that: If three in four of these are undeserving, that amounts to 22.5% of Harvard’s student body that wouldn’t otherwise be admitted on academic merit. In what universe is that acceptable?
And that’s not even counting the university’s blatantly discriminatory, race-based Affirmative Action standards that currently cheat Asian Americans. Harvard consistently rates Asian-American applicants lower on “personality” measures, according to the New York Times, just as it once did decades ago in order to limit admittance of Jews. If Harvard had race-blind admissions, Asian Americans would constitute a significantly larger percentage of the student body, suggesting that they’re held to higher standards and possibly even restricted with an informal racial quota.
Unlike racial discrimination against Asians, legacy admissions are permissible at private institutions. Still, both practices are unfair, and both ought to be terminated.
