# Legacy colleges represent a discriminatory admissions practice **URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/legacy-colleges-represent-a-discriminatory-admissions-practice/986533 **Category:** Great Debates **Created:** [July 4, 2023, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/legacy-colleges-represent-a-discriminatory-admissions-practice/986533 "2023-07-04T03:29:36Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 66
### Author: ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy) #### Post date: [July 9, 2023, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/legacy-colleges-represent-a-discriminatory-admissions-practice/986533/66 "2023-07-09T11:56:16Z")
Well said overall. > [@PhillyGuy](#): > > What the Supreme Court missed was that legacy preference, at a school receiving lots of federal funds (Harvard takes [69 percent of government research grants](https://research.fas.harvard.edu/indirect-costs-0) as overhead), like consideration of race, reasonably violates equal protection. They also missed that you can’t stop historically discriminatory schools from considering race and wealth unless the process uses a measurable and publicly available, simple or complex, formula. I don’t quite agree that the Supreme Court missed that. Although you may just have been being diplomatic while also understanding the rather more sordid reality. I think that they consciously decided that discriminatory policies in favor of legacies and whites (which categories have a lot of overlap) was their goal and so they carefully searched for their car keys only in part of the alley, studiously avoiding the lit area over there that would have shown up the error of their ways. Said another way, with this decision they have elevated a known long-standing bug to the level of fully supported feature. At one level, discrimination is a bit like toothpaste in a tube. You can squeeze it away from _here_ and it will reappear over _there_. Having an act of government (whether by legislation or by court action) force a change to the admissions formula used by a college with discriminatory intent simply makes them alter something else in their process to achieve the same goal. At a whole-society level we have been, and should continue to be, nudging the populace towards having / wanting less total discriminatory intent. It’s taking longer than we thought, and ref the rather acrimonious recent thread about the American Experiment\*, right now we’re racing in reverse back to the bad old days. IMO college admissions has always been one of the least-good places for a well-designed well-intentioned government effort to apply pressure towards equality. A vast amount of unequal potential has already been baked into the kids by the time they’re 17 and applying to colleges. As long as that’s true, tweaking college admissions is a bandaid on a gut shot; better than nothing, but far too little far too late. Fixing the upstream problems of kids’ vastly unequal schooling, parenting, socialization, and even nutrition (!) would require a lot more Federal action and Federal money at local levels. Which action is arguably unconstitutional, and would certainly be vastly, vastly unpopular cross much of the country. * * * \* See > [@Discussion question: is The American Experiment a failure?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/discussion-question-is-the-american-experiment-a-failure/986036): > > Continuing the discussion from [7 Jan 2021 and beyond - the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/7-jan-2021-and-beyond-the-aftermath-of-the-storming-of-the-capitol/930020/4290): Continuing the discussion here. The crux of the matter, as I see it, is that the USA is a melting pot that never really melted. Since the beginning we have had populations emigrating from all over the world (not to mention the indigenous population that we stomped all over), and how do you create a unified society and government to manage so many different backgrounds of all kinds? To me the… --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/legacy-colleges-represent-a-discriminatory-admissions-practice/986533)._