It would be interesting to see how the politicians vote considering how many of them come from legacy schools.
It is generally the case in Canada that attending a university or making a donation won’t much help your progeny. I prefer a meritocracy. (There are probably a few exceptions.)
However, I personally would use another word for this. Given the endowments of big American schools, this practice is not going anywhere soon, unfortunately.
My son’s father is an MIT grad, and our very-MIT-style-nerdy son applied to MIT when it was time to apply to colleges.
We very much respected MIT because they repeatedly reminded our son that there was ZERO preference given to legacies. I don’t know whether these constant reminders went to everyone, or whether their applicant database was sophisticated enough to flag applicants whose parents were MIT grads. Probably the latter, but whatever - they must have told my son five or six times that the fact his dad was an MIT grad meant NOTHING, admissions-wise.
The whole family respected MIT for this, including my son who was ultimately rejected.
Very true. In spite of me being a third or fourth generation University of Toronto legacy, I still had to have the grades to be admitted. I did, and I was, but just because a few generations of my family went there was no reason to admit me without proper credentials (i.e. grades).
I have heard of legacies at fraternities (wasn’t Kent–“Flounder”–a Delta legacy in Animal House because of his brother?), but not at university admissions at American universities. This decision, and the subsequent lawsuit against Harvard over legacies, is fighting my ignorance, that’s for sure.
Legacy preferences don’t always come in the form of automatic or even easy admission. I happen to know, just because the law suit is a famous one (it was on the subject of affirmative action), that the University of Michigan’s undergrad program, for example, awarded points for legacy status circa 2003.
All that to say, legacy preferences might be a lot more common than even the most cynical among us realize (not that I’m calling you cynical).
Yes, I don’t think the issue with legacy or donor preferences is that unqualified students get admitted because Mom or Dad is a graduate or because the applicant’s family donates a lot of money. The issue is that the institutions where this happens get a lot of applications and could admit multiple classes each year of qualified applicants - if you have 40,000 qualified applicants but only 2000 seats, it’s easy to choose among the qualified applicants based on donations or legacy status or really any other factor without admitting any unqualified legacies.
I saw an article recently that said that one reason this is not an issue in Canada is because the top three Canadian universities enroll more students than the top 18 US ones. Which makes sense - if Harvard accepted 12,000 students each year a lot of things would be different. For one thing, there wouldn’t be the sort of focus there currently is on selectivity , where an institution wants a low admission rate.
Legacy applicants shouldn’t really need any help. Chances are good that they come from an environment of wealth and access to quality education.
Here are two incredible arguments I’ve seen in defense of legacy admissions:
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Legacy admissions encourage donations, which leads to growing student bodies which help non-legacies. Sort of trickle down admissions economics.
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Preference to legacies allows non-legacies contact with the established families of wealth and power, offering a better chance for a networking foothold of their own.
Of course I’ve also seen the argument that it is a deserved perk which must be preserved but that’s just too much un-meritocratic bullshit for me to take.
I’ll be honest with y’all, since it’s come up in a lot of posts: I’m not exactly sold on the whole “meritocracy” thing. Not so much that I am opposed to the idea on its face, rather that I remain skeptical as to just how well-defined this “merit” thing is and how well-measured it may be, particularly as it relates to 17-year-old college applicants.
One of many reasons (probably the weakest, but a reason all the same) why I never had much of a problem with diversity as a justification for affirmative action (except to the extent that the diversity rationale struck me as a half-measure, when the real rationale should be remedying the nation’s and higher education’s long history of racism). I mean, at some point, it’s like you’re sorting blades of grass. Try and convince yourself that it’s possible to rank every blade of grass individually by merit all you want, but at some point maybe it’s fair to give preference to the blades of grass that it turns out are (1) actually people and (2) have suffered the lingering effects of historic racism and/or continue to endure racism in their lives.
ETA: Uh, anyway, to bring it around to legacies… I guess what I mean to say is (and this really is responsive to @Red_Wiggler above, I swear) I could perhaps be persuaded to accept legacy admissions preference on the same grounds–that there is some qualitative value that comes with legacies–but only if we can all agree that “meritocracy” is kind of bullshit. In which case, you know… how about some affirmative action?
For all his many faults, Malcolm Gladwell once made an argument I liked about Harvard wasting huge sums on admissions decisions. Instead, they should simply cover the names on applications, determine which ones qualified and then hold a lottery among the applications that met their standards.
Which is also one problem (at least at “elite” universities) with trying to calculate effect of any legacy benefit by looking at the number of students who parents who attended that university.
Qualified cannot be an objective standard. Some students are more likely to graduate at the bare minimum GPA. And some are more likely to graduate with honors.
If only five percent are admitted, that tells me the admissions standards are opaque. School guidance counselors must be advising many students that they can’t figure out what the Ivy League admissions standard is nowadays, so they might as well try.
Schools can’t reasonably say what exact cutoffs will be until they see the applications received that year. But before collecting the $85 application fee charged middle class applicants at both UNC and Harvard, they should provide a formula giving the applicant a reasonable idea, based on what happened last year, of whether they are wasting their money to apply there.
If they provided a formula, they’d probably be ashamed to say to add points for brown skin or for legacy or for parents having donated X amount to the school or for letter of recommendation from high ranking politician. Transparency would solve multiple problems.
This is almost literally the note that the Guidance department at my kid’s school sent to the parents of rising seniors last Friday. Basically between test optional and this decision it’s very hard to know what schools are possible did a given set of credentials.
I read elsewhere that legacy applicants had higher test scores than the pool of applicants in general. And logically, they should.
Why can’t “qualified” be an objective standard? When you talk about some graduating with the bare minimum GPA are you talking about graduating from high school or college ? Because even if you fill the freshman class exclusively with perfect test scores and a perfect GPA , someone will be at the bottom of the class at graduation - and if you’re talking about Harvard, you could probably fill multiple freshman classes with just perfect GPA/perfect test scores And even if you somehow find a way to rank all the 40,000 applicants, there isn’t going to be a real distinction between number 1990 (who gets in) and number 2010 (who doesn’t). There probably won’t be a real difference between 1990 and 2500
This is a good point. There’s a little danger that if more objective and academically-focused standards result in fewer C-average university students, forced to take the least challenging classes and majors to graduate, professors will make exams hard enough so that the number of C’s stays constant.
However, most professors are not actually ogres. If they see the mean quality of student work is improving, the great majority will consider that as a legitimate reason for grade inflation.
As for class rank, if elimination of holistic admissions means the bottom of the class starts performing like the middle used to, eliminate class rank. Googling, I find that Harvard does not not rank while UNC Chapel Hill does. I think more universities would eliminate rank if they saw low-ranking students were now high-performing.
I’ve read that claim before and never seen data to back it. Until I do, I will continue to think straight A+ high school transcripts to be extremely rare. Some high schools don’t record pluses and minuses, and maybe straight A’s are seen there. If Harvard really gets thousands of straight A transcripts every year, they could make showing pluses and minuses an absolute requirement, just like they require, I presume, four years of high school math.
As for home schoolers, and those who may go to progressive ungraded high schools, well, honestly, I just thought of them while writing this post. I don’t think they should be excluded, nor should they get automatic admission for a perfect SAT score (guessing you are correct that there are thousands of those). However, I think you would find extremely few ungraded applicants who have a perfect SAT score plus perfect scores on, say, three Advanced Placement tests. Objective is possible, even at Harvard.
As for the idea that weaker Harvard undergraduates, who would be in honors classes at UNC, are getting lifelong networking benefit by hanging around with the children of the New England prep school elite, I find this another implausible claim with data lacking. Even if it is sometimes true, it should be balanced by the disadvantages of mismatch.
The reason for transparency isn’t so that Harvard gets to educate the best of the best, however best is defined. That’s neither possible nor a matter of public interest. The reason is to combat racial and class discrimination by what are, to me, corrupt admissions offices. The Supreme Court should have realized that without transparency, they are likely to continue to discriminate.
If they wanted to fill Harvard with students with the highest high school grades. But they don’t want to, so there’s little point in this.
Massachusetts considering a tax on endowments, as a disincentive to legacy-based admissions.
One aspect is that the college may feel that some students will fit in better than others for a variety of reasons that are hard to quantify. For example, two students may be objectively the same in terms of test scores and grades, but one may fit in better with a introverted student body while the other would be better with a more extroverted student body. And the college is looking for students who will embody the spirit and mission of the college itself. A college which has a mission to improve the world may want students who are more social minded while another college might have a “win at all costs” mindset and would want students who are more competitive. The qualifications are often the basic qualifications to be considered for admission, but then the college will pick and choose among the applicants to create the student body that they desire.
That’s pretty much exactly where I started out :
Those are all reasons why a student might be qualified for one college but not another. They’re not reasons why “qualification” for any given college can’t be objective. All of those things you describe can be measured. The alternative is that the admissions personnel just go by their gut feelings of who’s more “social-minded” or “competitive” or “extroverted”, or whatever, and that’s a great way to inadvertently introduce all sorts of unwanted unfair biases (or to deliberately introduce wanted unfair biases, while masking that that’s what you’re doing).