Reply to Big College Admissions Year at St. Albans

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I don't know -- if the stats are equal, I'm not sure why I can complain if the college wants to maximize donations by admitting legacies.  That is a rational strategy for a private institution dependent upon endowment.

I do get the point of "affirmative action of privilege" but have seen abstracts of Espenshade's work in which I believe he does conclude that the effect of legacy admissions are rather small (it's been a while though, I should re-read).  I believe he thinks the preferential admission of athletes has a more significant impact, am I remembering correctly?

I believe it is likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule affirmative action for under-represented minorities is unconstitutional this year (the case out of Texas).  (Professor Espenshade has stated, by the way, that even if colleges switch to affirmative action based on socioeconomic status, that will result in a drop in the number of African-Americans and Latinos at highly selective colleges because the pool of low income white applicants is fairly large too.)  If, indeed, the Supreme Court ends what we think of as "affirmative action," I do wonder if public pressure/outcry might force the Ivies and other highly selective schools to disclaim the legacy preference.[/quote]

If the Supreme Court rules against affirmative action, it will apply to public/state universities, but not to private universities. Private universities, like private K-12 schools in this area, will continue to be able to make admissions decisions on whatever criteria they want. I would think that, if they want to retail legacy preferences, they would tout their affirmative action policies even more strongly.

As for the impact of legacy preferences, I think "small" may be in the eye of the beholder. The Crimson article said it was something like 10% of the class. So out of a class of 2000 that would be 200 kids, which is fairly significant, and could affect the "atmosphere" (for lack of a better word) of the class if there is a higher percentage of old money legacies compared to high-achieving kids who are 1st or 2nd generation in their families to go to college. But it's also true that these 200 kids with preferences aren't going to change the admissions chances of a kid who is the pool of 30,000 applicants very much. So it depends what you're looking at.

(Just to be clear, I'm against legacy preference, but not against affirmative action when it helps low SES kids. Yes, I do think affirmative action is a bit broken when it helps kids with 1 minority grandparent our of 4 grandparents, and high SES kids, but I wholeheartedly support it when it's helping a minority from a disadvantaged background. And you could describe my family as old money and my DCs do have potential legacy preferences at two ivies. So I'm not really knee-jerk anything, I'm just reacting to what I think is fair vs. unfair.)[/quote]

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