Time to End Legacy Preferences in College Admissions

As a Princeton graduate student in the 1980s, I was surprised to encounter many undergraduates who clearly fell short of the university’s intellectual standards. No, they weren’t Affirmative Action admits. In fact, not only were they not minorities, they were WASPish to a one: they matched the alumni demographics of a university that had minuscule minority enrollment until the 1970s, and which had notoriously turned away not only Blacks but also Jewish students for most of its existence. The WASPish students were beneficiaries of legacy and recruited athlete preferences—preferences that perpetuate Princeton’s discriminatory heritage.

Legacy preferences, unlike Affirmative Action, don’t even pretend to redress past discrimination or current disparities. Quite the opposite: they grant preferential treatment to the children of rich alumni, who collectively rank among the most privileged people in our society. The percentage of legacy students at Princeton has declined a little since I attended, but remains high.

Princeton, like many elite colleges, hides its admissions secrets behind a veil of “holistic” opacity, but we can glean a little from the limited data that it does divulge. The percentage of legacy students for the class of 2022 was 14.3%. Over a third of the legacies who applied were accepted, compared to only 5.5% for the entire applicant group! This looks like utter hypocrisy from an institution that claims students “of all backgrounds should have an equal opportunity to earn a position.” If Princeton, or any other elite university, wants to try to refute allegations of hypocrisy, I encourage them to divulge their admissions data in full. I’ll wait.

For Harvard, we don’t need to wait because the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit forced them to disclose their ugly secrets. Harvard’s legacy and non-legacy admissions rates, at 33.9% and 5.9%, respectively, are nearly identical to Princeton’s. The detailed data allows us to explicate these wildly disparate admissions rates. A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study of the data found that non-legacy white applicants with a 10% chance of admission would enjoy a staggering five-fold increase in that chance if they were legacies!

But the tilted field favoring wealthy white kids only begins with legacy preferences. I first realized that when I moved to a well-heeled Silicon Valley suburb. I was initially puzzled at how my wealthy neighbors—partners in venture capital firms—spent vast sums on individual sports coaching for their eight-year-olds and sent them to special sports academies in Florida. The goal, I discovered, was to secure their acceptance to college as recruited athletes.

Many of us think of recruited athletes as football and basketball players with underprivileged backgrounds. But these constitute a small minority in elite colleges, which offer numerous sports that underprivileged youth are rarely exposed to, including crew, swimming, hockey, lacrosse, sailing, and golf. Growing up with these elite-dominated sports (and expensive coaches) constitutes a tremendous advantage.

Recruited athletes in these and other sports account for a whopping 10% of Harvard admits. Lest you have any doubts about these athletes’ privilege: 26% of them come from families earning more than $500,000 a year (think of elite rowers like the Winklevoss twins). My venture capital neighbors clearly knew how to invest their money: hiring an ex-Olympian as your third grader’s private swim coach pays off in Ivy League acceptances.

When we combine the contingent of white students who benefit from staff and “dean’s list” preferences with the large numbers who enjoy legacy and sports preferences, their share of overall admissions is stunning: they account for 43% of Harvard’s white admits. The NBER study found that without the good fortune of their birth or the sort of athletic skills cultivated by ex-Olympian coaches, 75% of these kids would have been rejected.

This bears repeating: nearly half of white Harvard students got a boost from factors unrelated to academic merit; three-quarters of that contingent would have been rejected otherwise!

We can’t necessarily conclude that all other elite colleges match Harvard’s execrable record for favoring the most privileged students. But if they don’t, let them prove it by disclosing fully detailed admissions data: test scores, grades, everything. What do they have to hide?

These universities are private institutions that can admit whomever they choose. But if they continue to favor privileged kids for reasons other than academic merit, they should not receive a dime of taxpayer funding: no research grants, no Pell grants, no federal student loans—nothing. The Fair College Admissions for Students Act proposed in Congress last year is a good starting point for imposing that restriction. However, its scope should be expanded to prohibit recruited athlete preferences that benefit mostly wealthy kids.

Legacy preferences and Affirmative Action have an intriguing symbiosis, suggested by voting statistics that show the strongest support for Affirmative Action among wealthy white elites. For example, California’s Proposition 209, which limited Affirmative Action, passed by a substantial 9% margin statewide in 1996. But it lost by 8% in Marin County, the state's wealthiest (and whitest) county. A similar 1998 Washington State measure (Initiative 200) won by a 15% margin overall but lost by 5% among voters earning over $100,000 (double the state’s median income).

When we look at the Harvard admissions data, this anomaly starts to make sense: white elites don’t mind Affirmative Action because their kids are insulated from its effects by the even greater benefit of legacy and recruited athlete preferences. When elites support Affirmative Action, they can congratulate themselves for being virtuous and enlightened, while white and Asian kids who lack wealth and alumni connections pay the price. The fact that the legacy kids face competition that is constrained by Affirmative Action-lowered standards is icing on the cake for them.

Whatever one thinks of Affirmative Action, there is no reason to delay ending legacy and recruited athlete preferences—practices that we can all agree are malign and inequitable.