Legacy admissions in the eye of storm

Transparency undermined

Following the cheating scandal, more schools revisited the issue. Legacy admissions were criticized for compromising the principle of transparency and being directly at odds with the objective of advancing social mobility.

A growing number of prestigious schools have dropped legacy admissions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Amherst College in Massachusetts, Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

Purdue University in Indiana and Indiana University said they have not considered alumni relationships in admissions.

Two most recent cases are Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Both schools announced they would no longer consider applicants' ties to alumni in admissions decisions following the Supreme Court's ruling on Affirmative Action.

The practice was a distraction and "a sign of unfairness to the outside world", Wesleyan University President Michael Roth said.

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities will also stop favoring applicants who are the children of faculty members.

The Education Department's decision to investigate Harvard's admission policies was welcomed by minority advocacy groups. They said the legacy preference disproportionally benefited white and wealthy students who were less qualified and called the practice "an unfair and unearned advantage" for them.

"Legacy and donor admissions have long served to perpetuate an inherently racist college admissions process," Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement.

"Every talented and qualified student deserves an opportunity to attend the college of their choice. Affirmative Action existed to support that notion. Legacy admissions exist to undermine it."

Critics of legacy admissions said the Supreme Court's Affirmative Action decision underscores the need to end those preferences as well.

The complaint filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights quoted the Supreme Court's majority opinion on affirmative action: "College admissions are zero-sum, and a benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former at the expense of the latter."

Harvard and other universities have defended legacy admissions as necessary to strengthen the connections between alumni and the schools and encourage them to make donations. Overall legacy applicants were highly qualified, Harvard said.

In 2019, US colleges and universities raised more than $11 billion from alumni, almost one-fourth of their total fundraising, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

At Princeton University in New Jersey, 10 percent of the Class of 2025 are children of alumni, and 73 percent of legacy students in the Class of 2023 are white, according to university data.

Princeton has defended legacy admissions, saying giving preference to the children of alumni helps build a sense of loyalty and belonging and spur alumni to give back to the university.