Like a number of my college classmates (and not a few of my relatives) I was a teenage legacy student. Not exactly a werewolf, but close. In fact, I’m a member of the even more incestuous subspecies of double-legacy students. Simply put, around the year 1946 my mother left her wallet in a telephone booth in the college administration building, my father found it, and I was one of the results. But the saga really began earlier with an uncle, my father’s older brother. He was originally rejected by the same college but marched into the Admissions Office and somehow talked his way in. I thank him for his debating skills.
There are more than a few of us double-legacies walking around. Our classmates called us “alumni brats,” but without disparagement. (I never heard the word “legacy” in this connection until long after I graduated. I think it became a term of art in the 1980’s.) Having this background makes me either uniquely qualified, or uniquely unqualified, to discuss the subject of legacy admissions. Maybe both.
The policy of legacy admission has lately come under well-deserved scrutiny. I’ll get to that fraught subject in a minute. But first, regarding my own experience: I discovered some personal advantages to being a legacy student, beyond the obvious one of admission to the college of my (and my parents’) choice. I was able to share a formative intergenerational life experience with my parents. My memories of the college that we (and also one of my siblings and numerous cousins) all attended were enriched by the stories my parents told me. Thus, for what it’s worth, I arrived on campus with a sense of the college’s history and traditions that some most of my classmates had to pull all-nighters to achieve.
As a high school senior, I didn’t care all that much where I would go to college (though I care a lot about it now). I just wanted to leave home and high school. Had I been rejected by my parents’ alma mater, I would have gone to my second-choice school, which accepted me, and been perfectly happy. It also happened to be the school that my son eventually attended, which I guess would have made him a legacy student. But then, being my moral superior, he would probably in that case have gone elsewhere.
On balance, my admission to my parents’ college was very good for me, nice for my family, not so bad for the college, and probably bad for America. I’m willing to go with bad for America. But enough about me. What about legacy admission as a policy, personal interests aside?
The only arguments in favor of it, to the best of my knowledge, come from legacy students like me or from the colleges that admit them. Presumably they give more money as alumni; yet the data on that show little if any difference between legacy donors and other donors. The ties that bind families, rather than individuals, to a particular college are very real, as I can attest; but those bonds are also impossible to quantify or evaluate for their wider impact. And why should anyone else care about my family?
The arguments against legacy admission, on the other hand, seem both obvious and compelling. It’s a form of intergenerational transfer of wealth and/or cultural capital. (And yet, I wouldn’t have been any smarter or dumber, any richer or poorer, had I attended my second-choice school. The real “legacy” for me has been the friendships I formed at college, or with other alumni since graduating, and have maintained over a half-century.)
As engines of citizenship and social mobility, colleges and universities serve a core democratic function, yet they offer a relatively scarce social good; therefore, I tend to believe, admission should be strictly meritocratic. Legacy admission is the opposite of that. So is recruiting athletes, or people of color, or any category of people.
But some argue (including Richard D. Kahlenberg in his recent book, “Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges” that we should take class, not race, into account, even if it isn’t strictly meritocratic. Part of the argument is about engineering a fairer, more egalitarian society. Another part is the idea that strivers – people with more talent than resources – have to come further to be competitive with middle-class kids, and therefore deserve credit for that.
I’m unsettled on the matter. I’m not sure I disagree with Kahlenberg (I’ve not yet seen the book). I tend to think that class should trump race, although race is a cultural category with its own social valences and importance. And I certainly endorse Lyndon B. Johnson’s liberal war cry from his June 1965 speech at Howard University: “It is not enough just to open up the gates of opportunity. All of our citizens must have the means to walk through those gates.”
What’s the problem then? Well, selecting people for college admissions is a complicated business even before you start introducing filters. But then it gets even more complicated. There’s an inevitable ideological bias to any approach to higher education policy, even a supposedly objective meritocracy.
I certainly want more diverse student bodies, up and down the ladder of higher education institutions. My worry is not that some people or groups will get special treatment or special disfavor. It’s that colleges, important as they are as a rung on the mobility ladder, are being asked to shoulder too much of the responsibility for achieving a fairer society. It takes the heat off of government, and we the people, to make fairness happen at a much lower level: pre-K and K-12 education. If that happened, it wouldn’t matter so much who goes to Harvard or to a community college.
My own college has vastly diversified its student body. and offers a kind of non-legacy premium to first-generation college students. That isn’t strictly meritocratic either, but it’s certainly a good thing for the triangle of American citizenship: our civic life, our economy, and our culture.
One of the more interesting commentaries I’ve read on legacy admissions was by Matt Feeney in The New Yorker (“The Pointless End of Legacy Admissions, Nov. 23, 2021). The piece was so interesting (and so bizarre) that I had to read it twice in one sitting. Feeney makes a series of counterintuitive arguments, to the effect that ending legacy admissions is a fig leaf for the much greater sins of American higher education. Legacy students are scapegoats, and getting rid of them makes admissions departments look virtuous while committing manifold (but unspecified) other crimes.
I don’t want to go that far. I have never felt like a scapegoat. But Feeney admits that legacy admissions are basically unfair. “If you think of all the ways that élite colleges are entwined in the harshness of the American economy,” he concludes, “legacy admissions are hilariously marginal.” (Note the elite spelling of the word “élite”).
Underneath my bristling capitalist surface, I’m as radical as the next person. I want to live in a just society – by my definition of “just” – no matter how much it hurts. Most of the hurt (to me) is theoretical, but never mind that.
I’m not saying Feeney is wrong – and it could be a tossup; it’s just that I’m not convinced that legacy admissions are trivially wrong. The other sins of higher education, and of our society, would need further fleshing out. And that’s where things get really dense.
Would I do it again – attend my parents’ college, that is? Probably not in the moral climate we live in today, which (in this respect) is just slightly advanced over the climate that prevailed when I was applying to college; it’s been a case of three steps forward and two steps back. And I’m not a slave of conventional thinking. But I can’t think of a compelling case for legacy admission, and the fact that it benefitted me is irrelevant. And so, I’ll go with “no more legacy students,” and count myself lucky to have come up in a more primitive age.