Legacies, Race Preferences, And Fairness

Continuing its Iniquitous Ubiquitous Non Sequitur tradition of equating racial discrimination with other, comparatively trivial forms of discrimination, the New York Times recently ran a major Jacque Steinberg article on the unfairness of legacy preferences.

Now that critics of affirmative action have persuaded the Supreme Court to consider whether black and Hispanic applicants are taking the rightful spots of more-qualified whites, some supporters of race-conscious admissions are mounting a counteroffensive. They complain that it is the preferential treatment afforded some applicants because of their parents’ wealth or college affiliation that is unfair.

So, supporters of race preferences argue that discrimination in favor legacies or big contributors is unfair but racial discrimination is not unfair. This will give philosophers of fairness quite a bit to work on over the next generation as they create clever arguments to support this bizarre view.

Legacy preferences may well be unfair. They certainly contradict a commitment to pure merit, although not quite as much as race preferences generally do.

It can be difficult to mount an argument that those admitted to [the current freshman class at Middlebury College] were not otherwise qualified, at least by the yardstick of the SAT: the 30 legacies in the current freshman class posted an average SAT score (1389) that is 33 points higher than that of the class as a whole.

[….]

Nonetheless, the admission rate of legacies, even those whose parents rarely donate to the college, far exceeds that of applicants as a whole. At Middlebury, the admission rate of legacies in the class of 2006 was 45 percent, compared with 27 percent for the entire class. At Harvard, legacies who applied for the current freshman class were admitted at nearly four times the rate of students over all (39 percent, versus 11 percent). At Stanford, where nearly 10 percent of students in the freshman class are legacies, their admission rate (about 25 percent ) was double that of the class as a whole (12.7 percent).

But theirs were hardly the only applications that got a “boost,” in admissions parlance, on this campus and others. The admission rates for black and Hispanic applicants to Middlebury were each nearly 60 percent. And at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, whose undergraduate admissions program is one target of a pair of challenges before the Supreme Court, the 4 points (on a 150-point admission scale) awarded to children of alumni are dwarfed by the 20 points awarded to black, Hispanic and Native American applicants.

But, as I’ve argued a number of times (such as here, here, and here, to pick just a few), the most telling criticism of racial preferences is not that they compromise merit but that they compromise the fundamental principle that guarantees every person the right to be treated without regard to race, creed, or color. Rejecting that principle will have costs that far outweigh the benefit of admitting a relatively few minorities to institutions that their grades, test scores, and other relevant qualifications do not justify.

Say What? (1)

  1. Roger Sweeny February 17, 2003 at 2:59 pm | | Reply

    Perhaps legacies get in at a higher rate because they are better students:

    1) They have probably grown up in a high power environment and, to the extent that genetics influence intelligence, energy, and concentration, they are probably near the top in those.

    2) Because they have relatives who went to the school, they probably have a better idea whether they are “good enough” get in. If they don’t think they are, they won’t apply.

    BTW: My high school sent one student to Harvard last year. He was the valadictorian, an accomplished actor, won a writing prize, etc. He was also a “legacy.” Gee, I wonder why he got in.

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