Reply to Elite Colleges’ Quiet Fight to Favor Alumni Children

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[quote=Anonymous]Legacy admissions are not a "little boost".
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/31/opinion/legacy-admissions-should-have-no-place-todays-colleges/
[quote]
Amherst, MIT, Johns Hopkins, CalTech, and Pomona College are among the selective universities that have decided to forego legacy admissions. Meanwhile at Harvard, over a third of the next graduating class at Harvard, for example, is made up of students with a relative who also attended Harvard. And this system is deeply unfair:[b] According to a review of the top 30 colleges in the United States, legacy students were 45 percent more likely to be admitted than non-legacy students.[/b]

Ending preferential treatment to children of alums certainly won’t fix all of the problems with admissions processes, but it would contribute to a fairer system and a less insular student body. After all, legacy students tend to be rich and white — people who already have plenty of advantages — and effectively holding spots for them only makes it harder for these schools to bring in a more diverse range of students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. At Notre Dame, for example, the total number of legacy students in the class of 2024 is five times the size of the total number of Black students.

While ending legacy admissions is a step in the right direction, tuition and living expenses are the biggest barrier to entry for students from low-income families. When Johns Hopkins eliminated legacy admissions, the share of legacy students declined from 12.5 percent to 3.5 percent, while the share of students who were eligible for Pell grants grew from 9 percent to 19.1 percent. Increasing spending on grant money would help bring in more students from lower-income backgrounds, as well as first-generation college students.[/quote][/quote]

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