Legacy for You, but Not for Me

In the ’90s, being a low-income student of color in the Ivy League was hard. Our population was minuscule. We were inside a place of privilege, but not fully part of it. The institution wasn’t built for us, and we knew it. We weren’t like the wealthy white kids whose alumni parents came to visit their favorite haunts in their favorite old college sweatshirts. But we were, we believed, part of a different future. And someday, we would have the chance to put on those sweatshirts ourselves and visit our own kids as students at our alma mater. We were writing a new chapter in these schools’ long histories, and we dreamed our children would be legacies.

Now legacy admissions are under assault. In July, the group Lawyers for Civil Rights sued Harvard over its legacy-admissions policy, accusing it of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and filed a complaint with the Department of Education. This sparked an investigation of Harvard by the Biden administration, and could lead to either a settlement with the university or a prolonged court battle.

This week, the Departments of Justice and Education published a letter offering universities some advice on their admissions practices. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in June to strike down affirmative action, the letter called on schools to “seize the opportunity to expand access” and make their student bodies more diverse. They should “review their policies to ensure they identify and reward those attributes that they most value.” The letter pointed at legacy admissions in particular as a practice that can “further benefit privileged students” and “reduce opportunities for others.” Sensing a sea change, many colleges have begun to preemptively roll back their legacy-admissions policies before the new application cycles can even begin.

I chose not to have kids, but for years I’ve watched my friends of color delight in dragging their children to college reunions and dressing them in campus swag—tiny T-shirts announcing Class of ’27 or ’32 or whatever. One first-generation, formerly low-income Latina friend who went to Brown with me vowed that she would pressure her child about only one thing: getting into Brown. Many of these alumni, either loudly or under their breath, are asking: “Now that we’re finally on the inside, they’re shutting the door?”

It’s easy to understand why the movement against legacy admissions arose, and why it gained traction so quickly. Affirmative action was long a target of conservatives, as well as racists, seeking to strike down a system that “persecuted” qualified white students while “wrongfully” benefiting minority ones. After the calamity of the Supreme Court decision, many well-intentioned administrators and activists took aim at legacy admissions as a form of counterattack. They see it as the sacred cow of the rich white establishment, as well as a target they can actually do something about.

But this is the paper straw of higher education: a well-intended gesture that does nothing to solve the actual problem. And it ruins your iced coffee.

On a practical level, eliminating legacy admissions is unlikely to yield the desired effect. At many Ivy League schools, about 12 to 16 percent of each class is made up of legacies. (The portion is smaller at some.) The assumption is that freeing up these seats will make room for less “advantaged” students.

But this is naive. Ending legacy admissions will most likely mean only that wealthy children whose parents went to Brown will go instead to Yale or Columbia. There is simply no reason to think that the legacy slots will suddenly—and without affirmative action in play—go to low-income students of color. Like most slots, they will go to the white and well-off. A new study by Opportunity Insights found that children of the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to gain admittance to the Ivy League than the average applicant. Ending legacy admissions alone won’t change this number.

This attack on legacy admissions could also harm some of the very groups it means to help. And that is what really upsets me.

The loss of affirmative action matters because the policy made a difference. Campuses, perhaps particularly those of the Ivy League, were transformed by it. In 1980, roughly 11 percent of Ivy League students were Black or Hispanic. In 2015, that portion (which by then included multiracial students too) had more than doubled. According to data from the U.S. News & World Report, these students now make up roughly 27 percent of the Ivy League.

Transform the students, and you transform the alumni. Transform the alumni, and you transform the legacy applicants. A recent Slate article noted that nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white. Yes. But that means that 30 percent are not. That’s a big number, and it was growing.

When we talk about legacies, why aren’t we talking about those families?

That this has yet to be a focus of any conversation in the media or by the Biden administration raises troubling questions about what Americans mean when they talk about diversity. Do advocates of education equity want Black and Latino students in the Ivy League only if they are poor or first generation? Do our voices and experiences as minority groups not “count” without the added burden of poverty or the stress of being the first in our family to go to college? Or—perhaps more generously—are advocates of this shift simply ignorant of the fact that alumni like us even exist?

That the face of a legacy admit in the public imagination is that of a boyish WASP makes perfect sense. As does the ick around it. The policy was born out of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the 1920s because academic criteria alone were not enough to suppress the growing number of Jewish men from Eastern European families making their way through the gates of Princeton, Harvard, and Yale.

When people defended legacy admissions on the grounds that they preserved the “campus culture,” everyone understood that that was a euphemism for “keeping the place white.” This has changed, but failing to acknowledge that history has left legacy admissions mired in stigma. And perhaps this is enough of a reason, for some, to dismantle the practice.

People have also defended legacies on the grounds that they’re good for schools’ endowments. This defense, similarly, has been turned against legacies, as if alumni are just bribing schools to get their kids in. It’s certainly true that some rich alumni give to schools in the hope that doing so will help their children gain admittance. But it is also true that many schools won’t cultivate alumni donors whose children are in admission cycles. Most legacies aren’t Jared Kushner. And data suggest that they’re actually slightly more qualified than their non-legacy peers.

From where I sit—as a childless minority alumna, who is also a new trustee of my alma mater—the timing for this pearl clutching feels both ironic and painful.

Affirmative action is gone, but for the children of minority alumni, legacy admission remains one consistent pipeline to college. It’s a flawed pipeline, for sure, available to only a small group of students. But it’s still a pipeline. Don’t cut it off. And certainly not until these schools’ admissions officers can adjust to working without the tool of affirmative action.

I can already hear the objections, of how this is simply perpetuating a more diverse elitism. I do not counter that. I do counter the idea that dismantling legacy admissions would diminish elitism in and of itself. It won’t tackle the underlying issue plaguing America: that the ultra-wealthy have far more access to opportunity and privilege than everyone else. Nor will it quelch the desire, in a capitalist society, to fetishize the rare. Be it gym memberships or limited-edition handbags or colleges. Short of turning the Ivy League public, nothing will deter the many from wanting what only the few can have.

That said, I do sometimes wonder if the attention poured into analyzing the inner workings of the Ivy League is not somewhat wrongheaded. Yes, these schools serve as symbols for rarefied access and success in the American mind. But a symbol and a system are not the same thing. We would do better to focus on making all of higher education more equitable by buttressing our public community and four-year colleges. And I don’t just mean academically.

Probably one of the most joyful jobs of my numerous careers was the time that I spent overseeing alumni affairs and annual giving at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York system. Tuition there is below $10,000 a year and undergraduate honors programs are fully funded for in-state students, and the school is ranked among the country’s best at promoting social mobility. The young alumni I worked with there were as ambitious, accomplished, and curious as any Ivy League graduate I’ve known. But what they lacked—and what was my very challenging job to create—was an alumni network to lean on. Not because the alumni didn’t exist or didn’t want to engage, but because organizing a network requires resources.

Yes, schools need money to attract top faculty, and to build and maintain facilities, but they also need money to support the cultivation of social capital that is the real hallmark of elite Ivy League education. That social capital is what, in many ways, the legacy student so deeply embodies.

So hate the establishment if you want to. But don’t get rid of it the minute that Black and Latino people become members. Forcing colleges to give up their legacy-admissions policies won’t be that hard, but it won’t fix higher ed’s problems. We may as well be blowing hot air through a paper straw.