It’s Time to End Legacy Admissions

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the legality of the racial preferences that Harvard University uses in its admission process. The stated goal of those preferences is to increase the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the student body, but Harvard’s extensive use of legacy and other preferences makes achieving that goal much more difficult.

Harvard groups together four separate preferences which it refers to as “ALDC,” shorthand for athletic recruits, legacies (relatives of Harvard alumni), the children of faculty and staff, and applicants on the dean’s interest list, who are primarily relatives of major donors. The problem for Harvard is that most of the ALDC admits are white and well-to-do, precisely what the racial preferences that Harvard is defending seek to counteract.

The legal argument is that ALDC preferences, like the 13th stroke of the clock, undermine all that Harvard says about increasing diversity and thus are a sufficient basis for setting aside Harvard’s current admission process. But regardless of the legal issue, the use of legacy preferences in particular raises important policy questions for any college that employs them. If colleges want to increase diversity, they should follow the examples of elite institutions like Caltech, which has never had legacy preferences, or Amherst College, Johns Hopkins University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have abolished them. And, as the evidence shows, these preferences make a big difference.

The admission process for Harvard College (which admits undergraduates to Harvard) starts with determinations made in five categories to which numeric ratings are assigned: academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support and personal, plus a combined overall rating. In addition, Harvard specifically considers the race of applicants in its efforts to create a diverse entering class.

The legacy preference substantially undercuts Harvard’s stated goals in its undergraduate admission process in several ways. First, although the record does not contain specific data regarding the races of Harvard’s alumni, its dean of admissions acknowledged that legacy applicants are less ethnically diverse than the overall applicant pool. In other words, if Harvard simply eliminated this preference and opened the slots given to legacies to the general pool of applicants, that would lower the percentage of white students, thereby furthering the stated goal of obtaining greater diversity. As the trial judge noted, “If all of your legacies are white and all of your donors are white, then the larger that [preference] pool is, the less diverse your school population becomes in some ways, right?”

A second admission goal of the college is to provide an opportunity for students who had significant disadvantages in their lives to enjoy the benefits of a Harvard education and a Harvard degree. They include students whose family members did not attend college, which by definition would not include a legacy. Harvard classifies a student as being disadvantaged as one whose parents earn less than $80,000 per year. Children in homes with lower incomes may also have had to work while in high school. If so, that will reduce their ability to participate in athletics and other extracurricular activities, which would lower their objective ratings and put them further behind the curve to start. While not all legacy applicants come from families with incomes above $80,000, the vast majority likely do, and so giving an assist to legacies is inconsistent with the goal of admitting more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Finally, applicants who come from alumni homes, where parental assistance can improve a student’s academic performance, and where applicants can afford SAT prep courses and tutoring, already have significant advantages in the admission process generally.

The other ALDC preferences raise similar doubts about their consistency with Harvard’s stated goals. Harvard’s athletic recruitment program is not limited to football and men’s basketball but extends to all sports, for both men and women. According to the college’s website, those sports include skiing, golf, squash, fencing, crew, sailing, ice hockey, field hockey and lacrosse, none of which are known to attract large numbers of minority, inner-city or otherwise disadvantaged youth. And because there are so many teams for both genders, the number of recruited athletes is large and therefore has a significant impact on Harvard’s efforts to recruit racial minorities and students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The court record did not contain a breakdown of the racial compositions of each of the ALDC preferences, but the court of appeals included a finding of the racial composition of all admitted applicants and of ALDC-admitted applicants that clearly demonstrates how ALDC preferences decrease diversity in the entering class.

In addition, as the court of appeals concluded, ALDC applicants “have a significantly higher chance of being admitted than non-ALDC applicants.” While only 5 percent of all applicants have an ALDC preference, they comprise 30 percent of those admitted. Of course, many ALDC admittees might be admitted without any preference, but given the racial disparities between ALDC applicants and all others, the ALDC preferences almost certainly have the effect of creating a whiter and less disadvantaged group of admitted students than would be the case if these ALDC preferences were eliminated. While ending ALDC preferences alone may not assure that Harvard will achieve the levels of racial and socioeconomic diversity that it desires, it will come much closer by removing ALDC preferences that make it more difficult for Harvard to achieve its stated goals.

The evidence that Harvard offered to defend the legacy preference was modest at best. As Dean Rakesh Khurana described the reason for the preference, “Harvard hopes that its alumni will remain engaged with the college for the rest of their lives, and [legacy preferences] is one way that it encourages them to do so.”

Our institutions are venerable, I think that’s the right word, because they are revered over many, many years by a succession of alumni who come to love our universities and what they provide. It is entirely appropriate for them to believe that it would be wonderful if their children could also enjoy the same benefits that they enjoyed as students.

These are Harvard’s best witnesses that support legacy preferences. Their testimony can be summarized this way: We like our alumni, they help us, and so we will help them by giving preferential admission to their children. And make no mistake about it, the admission rate for nonlegacy and nonathletes applicants is about 4.5 percent, whereas in 2017 and 2018, legacies were admitted at the rates of 35.4 percent and 33.3 percent. Or, viewed from another perspective, “55 percent of legacies who are academic 1s and 2s [the highest rankings] are admitted compared with 15 percent of all other academic 1s and 2s.”

There is one other point worth noting regarding the elimination of legacy and other ALDC preferences. It does not require a court to speculate on whether or how an untested set of additional procedures would affect Harvard’s admission system. The numbers make it very clear that, if the ALDC preferences were eliminated, Harvard’s goals of increasing racial diversity and adding more disadvantaged students to the entering class would be furthered, even if not totally achieved.

Regardless of whether the Supreme Court sustains Harvard’s admission system, the message to all colleges and universities should be clear: if you want to increase racial and socioeconomic diversity, the easiest step you can take is to end legacy preferences.