Liberal Hypocrisy in College Admissions? Note for a Discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Oct. 27, 2018; see also

The legacy system is affirmative action for the privileged.

Image from article: A statue of John Harvard overlooks Harvard Yard, the oldest part of Harvard University’s campus.

We progressives hail opportunity, egalitarianism and diversity. Yet here’s our dirty little secret: Some of our most liberal bastions in America rely on a system of inherited privilege that benefits rich whites at the expense of almost everyone else.

I’m talking about “legacy preferences” that elite universities give to children of graduates. These universities constitute some of the world’s greatest public goods, but they rig admissions to favor applicants who already have had every privilege in life.

A lawsuit against Harvard University has put a focus on admissions policies that the plaintiffs argue hurt Asian-American applicants. I disagree with the suit, seeing it as a false flag operation that aims to dismantle affirmative action for black and Latino students.

But the suit has shone a light on a genuine problem: legacy, coupled with preferences for large donors and for faculty children. Most of the best universities in America systematically discriminate in favor of affluent, privileged alumni children. If that isn’t enough to get your kids accepted, donate $5 million to the university, and they’ll get a second look.

“It’s a hereditary principle at work in an area that should be meritocratic,” observed Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, who criticized legacy preferences in his book “Dream Hoarders.” Reeves noted the irony that in Europe and most of the rest of the world, there is no such explicit system of legacy preferences, yet in supposedly egalitarian America it is formal and systematic.

Isn’t it a bit hypocritical that institutions so associated with liberalism should embrace a hereditary aristocratic structure? Ah, never underestimate the power of self-interest to shape people’s views. As Reeves put it dryly: “American liberalism tends to diminish as the issues get closer to home.”

I write this as a beneficiary of affirmative action. I was an Oregon farm boy, and Ivy League schools wanted the occasional country bumpkin, so I milked this for all it was worth by writing a college essay about me vaccinating sheep, picking strawberries and competing in the Future Farmers of America.

Harvard wanted hicks from the sticks, so it chose me to help diversify its freshman class — and then Harvard had a huge impact on me. I’m also proud to have served some years ago on Harvard’s board and to have been a visiting fellow at its Kennedy School of Government.

There’s disagreement about how much advantage legacy confers. Material submitted in the trial now underway suggests that over a six-year period, 33.6 percent of legacy children were admitted to Harvard, compared with 5.9 percent of nonlegacy applicants.

Seven years ago, a Harvard doctoral student named Michael Hurwitz used sophisticated statistical techniques and found that having a parent graduate increased the chance of admission at 30 top colleges by 45 percentage points. For example, a candidate who otherwise had a 20 percent shot became a 65 percent prospect with a parent who had graduated from that school.

Earlier, a 2004 Princeton study estimated that legacy at top schools was worth an additional 160 points on an SAT, out of 1600 points.

Legacy preferences apparently were introduced in America in the early 1900s as a way to keep out Jewish students. To their credit, some American universities, including M.I.T. — not to mention Oxford and Cambridge in Britain — don’t give a legacy preference.

The top universities say that legacy preferences help create a multigenerational community of alumni, and that’s a legitimate argument. They also note that rewarding donors helps encourage donations that can be used to finance scholarships for needy kids.

Yet on balance, I’m troubled that some of America’s greatest institutions grant a transformative opportunity disproportionately to kids already steeped in advantage, from violin lessons to chess tournaments to SAT coaching. On top of that, letting wealthy families pay for extra consideration feels, to use a technical term, yucky.

Liberals object to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing tycoons to buy political influence, so why allow tycoons to buy influence in college admissions?

More broadly, what happened to equal opportunity and meritocracy? They may be ideals rather than reality, but why defend a formal structure of hereditary privilege and monetary advantage in accessing top universities?

“Legacy preferences give a leg up to applicants who have typically led privileged lives,” said Susan Dynarski, a (Harvard-trained) professor of economics, education and public policy at the University of Michigan. “It’s the polar opposite of affirmative action, which boosts applicants who have faced adversity. It’s unconscionable for a handful of elite colleges to amass enormous tax-advantaged endowments and use them to perpetuate privilege in this way.”

The larger problem is that 38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent. Over all, children from the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League colleges than children from the bottom 20 percent.

When family background already matters so much, do America’s best universities really want to put their thumb on the scales to help already privileged children — or allow their families to make a donation that buys a second thumb to press on the scales?

The student journalists of The Harvard Crimson editorialized: “Legacy preference is, in the simplest terms, wrong. It takes opportunities from those with less and turns them over to those who have more.”

Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The Times since 2001, and was a longtime foreign correspondent before that. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. @NickKristof • Facebook