The Legacy Dilemma: What to Do About Privileges for the Privileged?
Like Ms. James-Chakraborty, students and alumni of many colleges and universities — not just ultra-elite ones — are now wrestling with the practice of legacy admissions, a debate with far broader implications after the Supreme Court last month gutted race-based admissions programs and forced colleges to reconsider their criteria for accepting students.
It has sparked some bracing introspection and complicated feelings.
About the role familial connections played in the success of many alumni. About whether the practice of legacy admissions, which has long favored white families, should be eliminated just as a more diverse generation of graduates is getting ready to send its own children to college. About how to reconcile the belief that privileges for the privileged are wrong with the parental impulse to do whatever they can for their own children.
With the end of race-based affirmative action, the practice of giving admissions preference to relatives of alumni is particularly under fire at the most elite institutions, given the outsized presence of their alumni in the nation’s highest echelons of power. A new analysis of data from elite colleges published last week underscored how legacy admissions have effectively served as affirmative action for the privileged. Children of alumni, who are more likely to come from rich families, were nearly four times as likely to be admitted as other applicants with the same test scores.
Source: The New York Times
