As Long As We're On Legacies

There's been a lot of commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina cases. Just last Tuesday, I posted on the question of legacies, admissions policies that privilege offspring of alumni, in the makeup of Ivy League student bodies and their consequent impact on the US upper class. This is something of a mirror-image view of the affirmative action problem the court addressed, and it was discussed to some extent in the reporting. According to the New York Post,

At Harvard, applicants are initially scrutinized by a “first reader,” who gives the prospective student a numerical score in six categories: academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support, personal, and “overall”, taking race into account for the final number.

But the final decision doesn't really reflect all those criteria:

During a final winnowing process, four factors are considered: “legacy status, recruited athlete status, financial aid eligibility, and race,” with the last factor being “‘a determinative tip for'” a significant percentage ‘of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants,'” according to the court.

So of the four final criteria, legacy status and recruited athlete status make up two of the four, or half. As I pointed out on Tuesday, recruited athlete status privileges prep school applicants, since athletes are recruited for sports like lacrosse, rugby, golf, and rowing that often aren't available in public school athletic programs. (By the same token, the Ivies don't award athletic scholarships, so that top athletes in public-school sports like football and basketball will go to non-Ivy schools that will give them athletic scholarships and make them desirable to pro teams as a matter of course.) Although the court focused on the presence of race as a final determining factor in admission, legacy status, plus the upper-class bias in athletic recruitment, were mentioned only in passing.

In other words, per the decision, elite universities focus wrongly on race as an admissions criterion, but so far, it's still OK for the schools to privilege applicants with certified class identifiers, such as coming from a family of Ivy alumni or attending a prep school where they develop athletic prowess in upper-class sports.

Tuesday I cited Jerome Karabel's The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. As I noted then, Karabel covered the exclusionary policies in Ivy admissions in great detail, and he's heavily influenced my own view, except that his argument is that the Ivies are entitled to do this, and if they now choose to weight race as a major criterion, so much the better. Karabel commented on the case at Slate last November:

[T]he plaintiffs called for the total elimination of race-sensitive admissions. Their argument in these cases was not the traditional one that affirmative action discriminates against whites, but rather that it discriminates against Asians. One central argument that came up again and again in oral arguments is that just as Harvard imposed quotas in the 1920 to limit the number of academically talented Jewish students, it is now imposing quotas to limit the number of academically talented Asian American students.

. . . The claim that Harvard has imposed a secret “quota,” though, is at the center of the SFFA’s portrayal of Asian Americans as the “New Jews.” But the claim of a quota is not supported by the facts; the proportion of Asian American freshman at Harvard has risen gradually from 3.6 percent in 1976 to 10.8 percent in 1985, to 17.9 percent in 2010, to 27.8 percent in 2022. The contrast with Jewish quotas could not be more stark; at Harvard, Jewish enrollment, which had surpassed one-quarter of the freshman class in 1925, quickly plummeted to 15 percent with the imposition of the quota[.]

Nevertheless, after hundreds of words, Karabel finally acknowledges the real problem:

It has long been known, for example, that Harvard gives preference to the children of alumni (known as “legacies”); what was not known, however, was that they are admitted at a rate of 33 percent, compared to 5 percent for non-legacy applicants, and still comprise 14–15 percent of the freshman class. Even more striking is the extraordinary preference granted to recruited athletes; 79.5 percent of such applicants with a mediocre academic rating of 4 (on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 highest) were admitted, compared to an admissions rate for non-athletes with the same academic rating of less than 1 in 6,000.

In other words, the problem isn't so much that Harvard isn't currently discriminating against Asians quite as much as it used to discriminate against Jews, the problem is that there are basically two privileged groups, the upper class and certain designated racial minorities, that between them make up a significant proportion of admitted applicants. The rest, which we might call "walk ons" that are unable to claim either privilege, are squeezed between the privileged groups.

As a practical matter, the court in its Harvard and UNC decision has taken away the current justification for one of the two privileged groups, the members of designated privileged races. Certainly self-described spokespeople for the privileged racial groups are complaining, and they're likely to continue to press the Ivies and others to maintain or increase their numbers. But if the ivies do that, how can they now satisfy the Asians and other walk-ons who are demanding consideration? (It's worth pointing out, by the way, that "Asians" are a catchall term for people of Indian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and a wide range of other heritage.)

Well, for one thing, there are the legacies. Karabel himself says,

[S]ome of the admissions practices of Harvard and similar institutions, including the preference given to the children of donors—witness the case of Jared Kushner—need to change. Some of these changes, such as the abolition of legacy preferences and the reduction of the remarkable weight given to recruited athletes, would almost certainly redound to the benefit of Asian Americans.

A question I still have is how the legacy preference arose in the first place. This isn't much discussed. My reading over several decades suggests this was part of a more or less tacit deal the Ivies made with wealthy alumni donors beginning in the 1930s as applications to elite schools increased, and the schools felt a need to restrict admissions to students who could perform the work best -- but to satisfy the alumni, they quietly agreed to reserve a significant number of slots for their own offspring irrespective of their competitive standing.

Even now, limiting the numbers of these slots would cause alumni dissent far greater than the abortive alumni trustee movement of the early 2000s. I may discuss this further.