legacy benefit may be the University of Texas System. It has built a $30 billion endowment, while operating under a state ban on legacy
preference in public schools. This pretty much confirms what a 2010 Century Foundation study of 100 top colleges found: there is “no
statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving.”42
Finally, considering the third claim, it is true that
at Dartmouth, the “children of alumni made up about 12% to 13% of each entering class,” which some may contend is a relatively small number of students. However, a better indicator of the effect legacy preferences has on admission may be found in an Education Reform Now
(EFN) study of Harvard University practices. That study found that, given two students – both of whom had high academic qualifications, but one was the child of an alumnus and the other came from a household whose income was below $60,000 – the legacy applicant was twice as likely to be admitted to the university. So much for arguments of general qualifications, equity, or social justice.43
Maybe these realizations are why colleges are moving away from legacy admissions. There is simply little data to support such programs. Moreover, there is little institution or public support. A 2022 report from nonprofit think tank Education Reform Now found “eighty-nine percent of college admissions directors did not support the use of legacy admits, and three-quarters of public colleges and universities didn’t even provide a legacy preference.”44 Moreover, the Pew Research Center found “75 percent of respondents to a 2022 poll did not support legacy admissions, even before the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision.”45
The question thus becomes: will ending legacy
preferences eliminate discrimination and promote more equitable admissions to elite schools? The answer is no.
Researchers Raj Chetty and David J. Deming, of Harvard University, and John N. Friedman, of Brown University studied admissions at eight Ivy League schools — Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and UPenn — as well as Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago. They found “that kids from the richest 1% of American families are
more than twice as likely to attend the nation's most elite private colleges as kids from middle-class families with similar SAT scores.” Furthermore, they found ‘this disparity could only be found at elite private colleges: they find no such advantage for rich kids at America's flagship public universities, like UC Berkeley or the University of Michigan.’ As one of the researchers has been quoted as concluding, “I think implicitly what we're finding in the data is that — whether intentionally or not — we currently have a system that appears to have affirmative action for kids from the richest families, the top 1% in particular, which gives them a substantial leg up in admissions relative to other kids."46
Building upon their analysis, the researchers also found:
•
strongly suggests that it's not that these kids are just kind of stronger applicants in general. It's actually literally being a legacy at [a particular] college.
Small, isolated but well-endowed liberal arts colleges who have a particular brand will no longer be exempt from the demographic, economic, or social forces coming at them; nor will they be able to rely solely on their brand.
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