R: End Legacy Admissions

For the purpose of this debate, “legacy admissions” refers to any college admissions policy that gives any preference to a given applicant on the basis of his familial relationship to alumni of the college.

We should ask ourselves two questions when considering this resolution. First, what should be the purpose of the college admissions process? Second, does the practice of legacy admissions align with the spirit of this process? According to Yale’s website, the purpose of the admissions process is to identify “students we can help to become the leaders of their generation in whatever they wish to pursue.” Whatever one may think of the appropriateness of this mission statement, it is worth reflecting on. After all, these are the guidelines that selected each of us.

Objectors to the practice of legacy admissions may point to its history, which is hardly without controversy. Many such policies were implemented during the 1920s, as an attempt to preserve the status quo in the face of Irish, Jewish, and Catholic immigration. Even if these policies are not so blatantly discriminatory today, they contribute to a system of elite universities that manufacture exclusivity and measure success by their microscopic acceptance rates.

Legacy students, who have grown up steeped in the tradition of their parents’ school, will tend to have a deeper knowledge of the institution than their non-legacy peers, and will be more familiar with the nuances of the application process. This advantage is generally reflected in the quality of their applications, as Harvard president Lawrence Bacow noted in 2018: “It's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool.” So why should legacy students have their applications “double-privileged,” so to speak? These students have parents who are well-educated (if the university did its job) and who have ostensibly raised them to love learning and strive for great achievement. Why, then, should they be deprived of the privilege of achieving college admission on their own merits? It may well be conservative for a student to follow in her parents’ footsteps, or for parents to instill in their children a love for their alma mater. But these tendencies are in the domain of the family, and the university should not burden itself by intervening in family business.

A complaint often levied against the practice of legacy admissions is that it is anti-meritocratic. This sounds very scary. Surely, we want students to be accepted on the basis of their merit—we find it extremely distasteful when complicating factors, like secret bribes, interfere with the proper execution of the selection process. But why should we strive for meritocracy in college admissions? In practice, “merit” escapes objective standards, and its definition will always be untethered to any principles except the whims of the directors of the process. Whatever the flaws of the legacy standard, with its aristocratic tendencies, is it really better than sham meritocracy?

Another benefit of legacy admissions is that it fosters a sense of community—and not just community as an accident of geography and academic interest, but community through the generations, bonds between the living and the dead. This is exactly the type of community that conservatives claim is fundamental to a properly ordered society.

If we reject legacy preference in college admissions, which is based on accident of birth, must we also reconsider admission preference based on race, family income, or any factor besides “merit,” however defined? Is there a substantive difference between the preference given based on legacy status and that given based on race, class, sex, or other non-academic factors? Can we reasonably abandon legacy preference without proceeding into “pure meritocracy?” Finally, when we speak of reforming a college admissions practice, who holds the sword? Should this decision fall under the domain of private institutions, or does the state have authority to compel or forbid certain types of admissions practices?

Ultimately, we must decide whether the practice of legacy admissions aligns with the spirit of the university. Should we embrace its aristocratic tendencies? Or must we reject its discriminatory wiles?