In defense of legacy admissions to colleges
Legacy students are not a microcosm of the population
Giving preferential treatment to legacy students is unpopular. It strikes most people as unfair. It’s often framed as mediocre kids getting into top schools because their parents bought them their way in.
But what’s the point of college admissions? What are they trying to solve for? In general, a college wants to let kids in that will thrive. At the bare minimum, they don’t want to let a kid in just for her to drop out, especially if its an expensive elite school. Similarly, the school doesn’t want kids to do poorly in classes or feel left out socially.
Everything they look at is a signal for how well the kid will do in school. Much of college is taking tests. So GPA and SAT scores, which mostly measure the kids ability to take tests, are a decent proxy for how well the kid will do in school. curriculars are also useful in that they predict how a kid will adjust socially.
So does being a legacy provide a signal as to how the kid will do in college, one way or another?
Legacy students of elite institutions are not a microcosm of the population at large.
For instance, Princeton legacy admissions are actually pretty smart. Only 2.2% of legacy admissions scored below 1390 on their SATs, while 12.8% of non-legacy scored below 1390.
But that’s not exactly fair because legacy admissions are more likely to come from higher socio-economic households. So let’s look at the breakdown by household income. You can see that legacy admissions perform at least as well as their peers in similar socio-economic groups, at least in terms of SAT scores.
Look at GPA will tell you a similar story.
There are other articles that point to research that suggests the opposite.
In the same week as a civil rights inquiry into Harvard, new data shows legacies are slightly more qualified yet are four times as likely to get into top schools.
But I just don’t buy this. Explain to me how they are more qualified but also more likely to get into school? From what I read about the studies, they’re filled with obvious fallacies:
Harvard gives preference to applicants who are recruited athletes, legacies, relatives of donors and children of faculty and staff. As a group, they make up less than 5 percent of applicants, but around 30 percent of those admitted each year. About 67.8 percent of these applicants are white, according to court papers.
I could see this statement as part of a test in high school level reasoning.
What additional information would be necessary to determine if the 30% admission rate for these preferred groups is disproportionate?
How might the statement's focus on the percentage of white applicants in these preference categories potentially overshadow other relevant factors in the admissions process?
It might come as a shock, but if your parents went to an elite institution, they’re at least as likely as their peers to stress education and prepare their child for that institution. Genetics also plays a role as they are likely to be pre-disposed to do well in a formal educational setting.
So it doesn’t appear as legacy students necessarily get preferential treatment in terms of lower academic standards. But even there, you’d have to look at if being a legacy student provides a positive signal to the kid thriving in the school. And if it does, it can be argued that it should be considered, since the goal is to maximize the number of kids who thrive, especially at the elite level.
But its not clear to me that legacy students have any benefit, at least not any more than other groups that comprise the Princeton student body. And its unfair to look at crude statistics like “N% of Y student body is legacy” and try to draw some conclusions from that fact alone.
I agree that legacy admissions should not necessarily have lower standards, but I also don’t think there should be systematic ways to try to “fix” this problem. Especially since the solution would use this crude metric as a proxy for success. So you would essentially have to design a system to punish students who would otherwise have no problem getting in just because their parents went to this school