Getting into a competitive college is a difficult challenge facing millions of high school seniors around the country. But what if you had something that was sure to give you that extra push? Something that almost doubled your chances at getting in? The secret might just lie in your parents’ college experience, through a system used by many top American colleges. It’s called legacy admissions preference. Students with a “legacy connection” to the school through family members who have attended in the past are given preferential treatment when being considered for admission. This preferential treatment hurts institutional credibility and maintains the exclusivity of high-level colleges. At a time when college choice is an important qualifier for high paying jobs and future success, giving some students a superficial preference is unfair and unethical.
The degree to which legacy status is considered as a factor for admission varies, but only two major schools have publicly declared that legacy has no bearing on their decisions: Boston’s MIT and Pasadena’s Caltech. The main reason schools cite for continuing their consideration of legacy is the importance of maintaining alumni donations to schools’ endowment. Without the incentive of legacy admissions for their children, parents might not be as enthusiastic to donate to the schools they attended. Caltech and MIT, however, seem to be making due without these donations, with 2.5 billion and 13.5 billion respectively in endowments as of 2015.
Other schools with higher endowments continue to consider legacy affiliation as a factor in admissions, one example being Harvard University. According to a survey of more than 70 percent of the Harvard class of 2020, published on the Harvard Crimson’s website, 27 percent of admitted students had some degree of legacy connection, whether through grandparents, siblings, or directly through parents. And it isn’t just Harvard. Yale University published a profile of its class of 2020, citing 13 percent of students as having a legacy connection. Princeton University’s website cites 14.5 of the class of 2020 as children of Princeton Alumni. The University of Pennsylvania, better known as UPenn, cited 16 percent of their class of 2020 as legacy students. In an article from 2013 on Stanford’s Alumni website, alumni.stanford.edu, Stanford President John Hennessy is quoted as saying “And for alumni children, even though the admissions rate for them is two or three times higher than the general population, it’s still very tough to get in”. If this statistic remains true at Stanford for the 2016 admissions cycle, legacy applicants have a 9.4 to 14.1 percent chance of being admitted, compared to 4.7 percent of other students.
Many other schools at the highest level are hesitant to reveal these statistics, and they do not publish the details of legacy admissions in their statistical analysis of their incoming classes. Nonetheless, there is no significant evidence that they do not consider the legacy status of applicants as a factor. In an age when college admissions can determine so much of students’ lives, isn’t in the best interest of colleges to only admit the best students? The main reason so many people apply to these types of schools is their reputation for producing excellent students. The value of an admission to these exclusive institutions is cheapened by the fact that students who couldn’t get in without the boost of their legacy status would graduate along with everyone else without having achieved the same success as their peers. Personally, I’d prefer a school that has the same standards for everyone, regardless of who their parents are.
