How Big Is the Legacy Boost at Elite Colleges?
It has been well established that legacies have an advantage in elite college admissions. But the new data was the first to quantify it by analyzing internal admissions records. The researchers — Professor Friedman and the economists Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard — also analyzed comprehensive data of where students applied and attended, whether they received a Pell grant for low-income students and what their SAT scores were, as well as their parents’ income tax records, from 1999 to 2015.
They used more recent data, including the income tax records of graduates of the dozen top colleges in the study, to analyze their post-college outcomes. They estimated that legacy students were no more likely than other graduates to make it into the top 1 percent of earners, attend an elite graduate school or work at a prestigious firm. If anything, they were slightly less likely to do so.
“This isn’t about unqualified students getting in,” said Michael Hurwitz, who leads policy research at the College Board and has done research on legacy admissions that found similar patterns. “But when you’re picking a class out of a group of 10 times more qualified students than you can possibly admit, then a modest thumb on the scale translates into a fairly large statistical advantage.”
The additional boost legacies receive in admissions has recently been questioned by members of Congress in both parties, and President Biden. The Supreme Court raised the issue when it ruled last month that race-based affirmative action was unconstitutional.
“This preferential treatment has nothing to do with an applicant’s merit,” wrote Lawyers for Civil Rights, which filed the complaint with the Education Department. “Instead, it is an unfair and unearned benefit that is conferred solely based on the family that the applicant is born into. This custom, pattern and practice is exclusionary and discriminatory. It severely disadvantages and harms applicants of color.”
Source: The New York Times
