HEAR, HEAR!
PSU 02
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8P9**
OK, I’m not really that school-spirited, but in the face of such blasphemy… 
(bolding mine)
How many threads and op-eds dealing with unfair admission policies center around legacies?
Forget about “center around”. How many of these threads and op-eds even care to mention legacies? Either that subject is ignored altogether, or rather incongruously, it’s defended at the same time that ethnic preferences are complained about. So your experiences completely contradict mine.
To me, it’s pretty obvious that blacks receive a disproportionate amount of scrutiny when it comes to admissions. You would have to have your head in the sand not to see otherwise. Points are awarded to prospective students based on all kinds on merit-less qualifications. Gender, geography, and financial hardship are a few, in addition to legacy and ethnicity. Blacks are not the only ethnic minority that benefits from AA, but that’s where all the focus usually goes to, as is evident in the OP’s snippet. Women benefit from AA, particularly in the hard science programs (saw this first hand at my undergrad alma mater), but I rarely see women on the chopping block in these kinds of discussions. It is always about black people.
Until it stops always being about black people, I will have a hard time being sympathetic to the meritocracy advocates.
I said that the opinion that legacy is okay was rare. The fact that few op-eds or threads deal with legacy is almost proof of that. No one, other than university presidents concerned with the donations coming in, is willing to defend the policy.
How many students get in on legacy admission rather than affirmative action? Serious question, as I have no idea.
I see what you’re saying, and I agree to an extent. But, I’ve been under the impression that legacies are not as prevalent as racial affirmative action students. If that impression is incorrect, then I completely agree with you that both should be singled out in equal amounts. If that impression is correct, then it is logical to concern yourself with the situation that arises more commonly.
You might be completely correct, and that impression might stem from the increased attention that racial affirmative action receives. Again, I honestly don’t know the numbers.
I don’t think financial hardship or geography are meritless (the former more deserving of merit than the latter, in most cases). If a poor kid or a kid from the middle of nowhere that can’t attract good teachers manages to do nearly as well on the SATs as a rich kid from Manhattan, that is more impressive than than the rich kid’s score, and thus he merits a better looking application.
Gender is an interesting situation, because if anything, men are now pretty severely underrepresented at universities. Obviously, they aren’t a traditionally discriminated against group, but it will be interesting to see what happens in the next decade if this trend continues.
As much as we might disagree, I won’t disagree with anything that you have to say about legacy. It’s bullshit.
I got in as a legacy, I would assume. My SATs were 1490 (740/750 IIRC) and I got all As in high school, but I was unremarkable as a person. But my father and brother went there and I assume that was the deciding info. I know because I didn’t get into Harvard, Yale, Brown,…U of C was my safety school and I got in there only, besides PU.
And yeah, there are plenty of alum letters around admission time angry about their kid not getting in. If anything, they would want more legacy favor.
As far as financial hardship, admissions are supposed to be need-blind. Not sure what that means in reality.
Few people are going to go on record defending it, true. But my point is that those who present themselves as anti-preference are often quite noticeably silent on legacy. These folks always seem to direct their ire towards black students.
According to this article, less than 6.5% of incoming students at the Ivy Leagues are black. That’s not a whole lot when you consider that blacks make up almost twice that percentage nationwide.
According tothis article in the Washingtonian:
The challenge is to determine who got in only because of AA and legacy. You can’t assume that 100% of the blacks got in because of AA, nor can you conclude that about alumini offspring. But even if all the blacks got in because of AA, we’re still not talking about a lot of people. I just can’t see myself getting worked up over the Black Horde when the number of blacks period (qualified or unqualified) is so small relative to those who got points thrown their way simply for being someone’s son or daughter.
The only possible response:
Toga party.
Which, although sloppy, makes sense, considering that there are many more AA admits than legacies, and, according to the paper I quoted, AA gives a slightly larger edge. It makes sense to attack the largest and therefore most visible problem first.
While we can’t determine the number of individual black students who got in with or without preferences, it is possible to quantify the bonus given to the population as a whole, as I posted above. And if we’re talking number of students, again, if you consider the Black Horde puny in size, the legacy group must be even more so.
Part of this might just be because legacy is so obviously wrong, that there is no point in debating it. There are innumerable threads on affirmative action here, and there is honest debate to be had on the issue. But, start a thread on legacy and it will sink like a stone because my guess is that you’ll have a hard time finding someone to defend it.
You have provided no evidence of that. The paper states that legacies don’t effect minority enrollment, but it’s silent on the displacement of qualified non-minority applicants. If someone in the anti-AA contigent wants to talk about fairness, it would behoove them to look at that.
It’s hardly surprising that legacy doesn’t displace that many minority students since 1) there are so few minorities to begin with and 2) whatever “displacement” would have occured by a legacy admission is canceled out by the points that a black or Latino receives. That’s why I was extra unimpressed by that quote of yours.
Are you kidding me?
Legacy is not so “obviously wrong” or else it still wouldn’t be in practice. Things that are “obviously wrong” usually get the most complaints, as well. But what do we see?
Legacy is going on strong and it’s gets the fewest complaints.
AA based on race has been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and garners the most vehement complaints.
Hmmmm.
I will defend legacy admissions, above a certain minimum standard. It based on this hypothesis:
School traditions have value. In this I mean that there is something MORE to a school than just its current slate of faculty and students. The long-term history of the school matters, and legacy admits help keep that history alive. It is hard to quantify this, I admit. I realize that this can have the risk of an old boys club as well (though legacies can be daughters as well).
Alumni REALLY matter. Having alumni that come around and hire undergrads helps a lot. Having alumni that donate money helps even more. Schools need money, and alumni are a great source of that cash. Alumni expect something for their donation, and if they don’t get it - the well runs dry.
For the same reason that it is obviously wrong for an oil company to give money to a politician to influence policy. The alumni give a whole lot of money every year to the colleges, and they expect a return on their investment, just like the oil company. I bet in their heart of hearts, these alumni don’t even think that it is right but manage to justify it in their minds.
Legacy doesn’t exist because many people think that it is right, it exists because money talks.
Again, my proof that it’s obvious is this board. Is there anyone here willing to defend legacy admission? I’m willing to be proven wrong. Can you imagine anything that Dopers won’t debate? I’m willing to bet that it would be very difficult to find someone to debate on the pro side of legacy admission.
On edit, the post above seems to prove me partially wrong!
You might have a point as far as op-eds are concerned, but how about we compare the number of court cases brought against policies regarding athletes or legacies? A year doesn’t go by that a major case regarding AA doesn’t go through the court system. Presumably because the plaintiff feels the policy is unfair to them. How many of those people sue schools over their policies regarding athletes or legacies?
And I would contend that nobody really knows. You can create some statistics about average test scores, but that doesn’t tell you that an individual got in because they were Black as opposed to them being class president, or reminding the admissions person of their neighbor. Admissions is a pretty subjective process that cannot always be scrutinized solely based on test scores.
Well, I think my being Black has had more of an effect on my life than being from NJ has. At least as opposed to being from another state would.
Or a kid from a great, more competitive school completed more work, harder work, and did so competing against better competition. Why should a kid whose done well at an awful school get an advantage because his parents didn’t work as hard as a rich kid’s? It’s like drafting a guy playing Div 3 college football over a guy playing Div 1a football based on similar combine scores. Sure, it’s a better, more inspiring story, but it makes no sense.
athelas ain’t exactly joining us on the anti-legacy carpet either, with his attempt to prove that AA and legacy are apple and orange issues.
Race (and gender for that matter) is a protected class (I will let the local legal types pontificate on the Constitutionality of all of that elsewhere), while being an athlete or legacy is not.
Title IX spawned a ton of lawsuits about athletes, but not on the admissions front I admit.
Finally, Legacies. I guess part of the question is whether or not you believe in nature/nurture benefits. If you had two groups of kids, one group has Harvard parents and one group has parents who did not go to college - I would hypothesize that the children of Harvard parents would have a better chance of performing well at Harvard. There would be exceptions, but that as a whole and with all other factors being equal (SAT scores, for example) - the legacy kids are better prepared for the Harvard educational experience.
This does NOT mean that there are other very good reasons to admit other kids - but I am going to play the Legacy Advocate in this thread, so I thought I would toss down another line in the shifting sands.
{full disclosure - I am NOT a legacy, but I am married to a legacy and I have two white male children that I hope will have an edge in admissions when the time comes}
If this is the case, it’s even more reason to let them compete among the hoi polloi without assistance. Their scores, grades, and accomplishments should speak for themselves if they are truly better prepared.
On what grounds would they sue?
Nope - the whole reason to admit on factors other than standardized tests is that the tests do not always catch everything.
The GMAT score, for example, has been shown to predict GPA in the first year of an MBA program only. (sorry - no link, presentation I went to - disregard as you see fit).
Admissions officers will cut a candidate slack if they performed well in trying circumstances. “If they can get good grades in the inner city, then just think how well they will do once they get here!”
For the same reason legacies might be seen as not having performed to their top potential, but it is assumed that they will do just fine once they hit the campus of their forefathers (and mothers).
Would you be prepared to use this argument in defense of AA? Just curious.
I don’t agree that this is the underlying reason why inner city students are given a leg up, but assuming that this is true, I fail to see how this rationale is applicable to the child of a Ivy grad. What “trying circumstances” do these kids as a group have to overcome that would mitigate their test scores? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.