Quotation from: Jennine Capó Crucet, "Wait, How Did You Get Into College? How first-generation students learn about the myth of meritocracy," The New York Times (March 16, 2019); see also (1). More from the article:
Early in my first semester, I found myself in a dining hall sitting across from a fellow first-year student, a white woman from a New York suburb. We were having the kind of awkward lunch that characterizes those first days of college, when you’re wondering if someone could be a friend. As we picked over our pasta, she joked about her mediocre math grades in high school, mentioning that though her school offered them, she’d never taken any A.P. classes. I choked on some soggy macaroni: I’d taken more than a dozen since my sophomore year in high school, because that’s what I was told it took to earn a spot at a school like Cornell. How, then, had she managed to get in?
I asked her that exact question, between bites, because I hadn’t yet learned that these things aren’t talked about so openly at schools like this. She said, “I’m a legacy.” I asked what that meant — it was the first time I’d ever heard someone describe themselves that way, and it sounded as if she was about to reveal that she was an alien or part of a “Terminator”-esque army.
She explained that several generations of her family had gone to Cornell and that her family had, for decades, made large donations to the school. I’d never heard of legacy admissions, or development admissions, where donations to the school can help a student’s chances, or any of the other euphemisms for what seemed to an outsider like me to be buying your way into college.
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