Weighing the Pros and Cons

Recently, a great deal of attention has been paid to “legacy admissions” in colleges and universities. Some say it has its place in the admission practices followed by colleges and universities while others say it is unfair to students who otherwise would be admitted but don’t have a hook to be admitted.

What is Legacy Admission?

The practice entails colleges and universities giving some students who are related to alumni preferential treatment in admissions. This advantage has come under scrutiny in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling against college admissions policies that consider an applicant's race.

In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions via the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC rulings. Since that time, some critics have called for a reassessment of legacy admissions because the policy is similarly unmeritocratic.

According to Jeremy Engle, writing for the New York Times, at present, nearly 50% of four-year colleges and 80% of highly selective colleges still use legacy admissions. However, these policies have not gone uncontested.

When UC Berkeley, UCLA, Texas A&M, and the University of Georgia ended race-conscious admissions, they also ended legacy preference. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Education recently launched a civil rights investigation into Harvard’s legacy admissions practice. State legislatures are also making their presence heard. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin signed a law banning legacy admissions in its state institutions, and Connecticut and New York are likely to follow.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California recently signed legislation that bans private universities in California from favoring legacy applicants. California is now the second state after Maryland to pass a law that forbids consideration of legacy and donor status at private institutions.

Getting a Leg Up?

David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, says that just holding legacy status doesn't guarantee admission. “It’s not something that’s applies across the board or consistently – that just having alumni relations is enough to get you in. It tends to operate more as an influence factor, once other factors are taken into account,” Hawkins says.

Legacy students usually have to be at least “somewhat in the ballpark” in terms of grades, test scores and extracurriculars, says Joan Casey, a certified educational planner and founder and president of Educational Advocates College Consulting. I’m not sure what “somewhat in the ballpark” really means. Does it mean a student with a 3.0 grade point average can get admitted to a college where other students have GPAs closer to 4.0?

And if a legacy student’s parents are prominent figures, such as politicians or celebrities, or have contributed large amounts of money to their alma mater, their status may carry even more weight. Casey says some schools might even offer delayed admission to these legacy applicants if they agree to take a gap year, depending on the number of available seats in the incoming class.

Overall, observers say, legacy status offers a significant boost at many schools across the country.

What Are the Pros?

Experts agree that one of the main motivators for institutions to give legacy preference is that it helps their bottom line.

Emilio Castilla, a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, conducted a research study focused on data from a single unnamed institution over 16 years to determine why some schools still prefer legacy applicants.

“We found strong evidence that the college we studied benefits economically from admitting legacies,” Castilla says.

Castilla says legacy students are often more likely to be financially able to pay for tuition and require less aid and are more likely to accept an offer from their legacy institution. Legacies may also be more likely to make larger and more frequent donations after graduation. Their legacy status can also incentivize continued donations from the related alumni.

Many proponents of legacy admissions also argue that familial ties to a school help build a sense of community among both students and alumni based on the identity of the institution.

Writing for the Princetonian columnist Sarah Park argued for the acceptability of legacy admissions, She stated,

“Legacy admissions have advantages on account of their ability to foster “intergenerational community” and noted a general negativity about legacy and legacy students themselves. This negativity exists for good reason: legacy admissions perpetuate privilege and have, historically largely benefitted wealthy, white students. But as time goes on, diversity is increasing within the legacy pool, despite the fact that it is still less diverse than our campus as a whole. No longer are all legacies stereotypical, privileged, white kids. As Princeton continues to diversify, legacy will too. If we end legacy now, we are prematurely eliminating the advantages that come from a more diverse intergenerational community.”

What are the Cons?

Wealthy, majority-white students already experience several additional advantages, including access to private admissions counselors, expensive summer programs, and networking benefits. Combined with legacy status, these benefits are likely to result in what some critics contend creates too much of a cumulative advantage. Especially when considering that approximately 15-30% of top institutions are made up of legacy candidates, some assert that the college admissions process should be blind to family heritage.

On a base level, the argument against legacy admissions is intuitive. Even if they do not guarantee admission, legacy preferences are definitively unmeritocratic and statistically disadvantage minority and first-generation students. Legacy preference is also largely unpopular; a 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 75% of Americans don’t believe colleges should consider legacy status.

More research is needed to tease out the exact impact of legacy preference on alumni donations, independent of wealth, race, ethnicity, and other factors. However, what remains evident is that when confronted with the prospect of eliminating legacy preference, colleges are wary of the shift and anticipate losing out on funding.

Many institutions that have legacy admissions have faced increasing pressure to halt the practice, mainly from detractors claiming the system favors more privileged applicants and decreases diversity on campus. But experts agree that legacy demographics can vary between schools. Some schools that terminated legacy programs in recent years have reported noticeable changes in the demographic makeup of incoming classes.

Ethical Considerations

Deontology is a duty-based approach to ethical reasoning. We might ask whether a university has a duty—ethical obligation—to treat all applicants the same and not give preference to legacy admissions. If they don’t, harm can come to those without the ability to use the advantage of being from a legacy family. Imagine, for example, asking the question: Would you want other students to be admitted under a legacy program? The logical answer is no, because it makes it harder for an individual with the legacy advantage to be admitted. The competition is stiffer.

Using a Teleological approach, the harms and benefits should be weighed and the alternative that maximizes the net benefits to the stakeholders would be chosen. I have already discussed harms and benefits, however there is no one good weighing system to evaluate these outcomes by placing a monetary value on the legacy practice. We may be able to measure the benefits—additional donor donations. However, how can we measure the harm to students who may not be admitted because their place has gone to a legacy beneficiary?

There are, of course, many more ethical issues to consider. Utilitarianism conceives of outcomes as the ultimate ethical determinant. It would justify the legacy policy based on whether it cultivates the greatest welfare for the most people. However, can we reliably assess those outcomes, which may include a legacy contributing more to society after graduation?

Deontologists see humans as having equal value and claims to autonomy, dignity, and respect. The deontological perspective evaluates policy by its nature, whether it is inherently right or wrong, not by its consequences.

It’s clear that Deontology will consistently reject legacy admissions because they provide an unmeritocratic advantage to certain students over others. By contrast, we’ve observed that Utilitarianism can take contradictory positions despite its singular emphasis on outcomes, hinging on whether it anticipates a positive or negative result.

Utilitarianism’s outcome-centric stance is riddled with tradeoffs. On the one hand, Utilitarianism might support legacy admissions because it increases alumni funding to institutions, therefore strengthening the overall welfare of higher education and enhancing its contribution to society. On the other hand, Utilitarianism also confronts the reality that legacy preference exacerbates financial and racial disparities by favoring those who are already privileged, thus creating more unequal and unjust outcomes.

One potential solution highlights the possibility of redirecting legacy funds towards scholarships or programs aimed at minority and low-income students in an effort to mitigate existing disparities. However, conclusions surrounding the relationship between legacy preference and alumni donations were unclear. How much revenue do legacy admissions actually generate, and what fraction can we expect to be allocated to minority programs?

The Path Forward

The conversation surrounding legacy admissions is just heating up. At present, 53% of selective four-year colleges and 80% of highly selective colleges still consider legacy preference. Admissions boards and state legislatures alike have defended and questioned the policy, and it remains unclear what the path forward will be.

The tradeoffs highlighted by the deontological and utilitarian lenses may offer a valuable perspective and should be considered. What’s needed now are ongoing discussions in higher education circles and centering principles of fairness and equity. Higher education would do well to spend the time to analyze these critical factors in determining whether the benefits of legacy admissions outweigh the costs of the practice, as discussed in my blog.

Posted by Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage, on November 6, 2024. You can sign up for his newsletter and learn more about his activities at: https://www.stevenmintzethics.com/.