With the Supreme Court ruling today that admissions offices may not consider race in their decision process, the nation’s most selective colleges face a test. Will they remain committed to enrolling a diverse student body, knowing that diversity benefits all students on campus, or will they revert to the bad old days, when elite colleges were reserved mainly for the privileged?

An easy bellwether will be how colleges handle legacy preferences. Eliminating such preferences — an advantage to the relatives of alumni in the admissions process — will not offset the harm that will be done to campus diversity by today’s ruling, but ending a practice that disproportionately harms students of color and that three out of four Americans disapprove of is so obvious and easy a response that any college that does not is making it clear how little it genuinely cares about diversity.

Although many colleges consider legacy status, legacy admissions wield the greatest power at the same colleges that will be the most affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Eighty percent of the institutions that admit less than a quarter of their applicants also make it three to five times easier for legacies to get in. Numbers are not easy to come by on legacy applicants because colleges hide them away, but the trial of the case against Harvard revealed that its legacy applicants were five times as likely to be admitted as students who didn’t win that particular birth lottery.

The trial also revealed that 76 percent of legacy applicants and 77 percent of legacy admits at Harvard were white. That’s not surprising, given the history of racial exclusion at most highly selective colleges. Legacy admissions effectively operate as affirmative action for the white and wealthy.

The demographics of legacy are important to consider because one of the last-ditch defenses of legacy preferences is that, as colleges start to become more diverse, ending that type of preference will hinder the children of alumni of color. Leaving aside the dubious ethics of justifying a corrupt practice by allowing slightly more people to benefit from the corruption, the reality is that people have been trying to ban legacy preferences for decades because they give an advantage to the people who already enjoy the most advantages.

Another of the disingenuous defenses highly selective colleges make for legacy preferences is that they function only as tiebreakers for highly qualified students. Let’s accept the premise that legacies are indeed well prepared to succeed at elite colleges. Why wouldn’t they be? If your parents graduated from Yale or Stanford, you probably enjoyed the financial benefits of their degrees, social networks, and knowledge of the college-application process. Is it really a surprise that someone who has access to private school, math camps, sports clinics, SAT tutors, and a college-application consultant is a strong applicant? Why put a thumb on the scale for the people who least need it?

Worse yet, at highly selective colleges, tiebreakers are everything. No one is admitted to these colleges due to one factor, whether it be test scores, grades, athletic ability, race, or, indeed, legacy status. In order to have a chance of admission, an applicant must have multiple strengths, but even that is not enough. After admissions officers have narrowed down the pool, there are still too many highly qualified candidates for a limited number of seats in the freshman class. During a process known as shaping a class, a single factor can make a large difference in a highly qualified applicant’s chances of being offered admission over other equally talented students.

During the trial, Harvard’s admissions dean talked about two of those factors. He testified that coming from a low-income household raises the odds of admission for a student who receives a top academic rating from 15 percent to 24 percent, which is fair since educational opportunity is tied so closely to income and wealth. Less fair is the fact that a legacy with a similarly high academic ranking sees those odds go from 15 percent to 55 percent. In other words, if you’re smart and poor, you’re still getting rejected by Harvard three out of four times. If you’re a smart legacy, however, you’re more likely to get into Harvard than you are to be rejected.

Legacy preferences have always been unethical and anti-egalitarian, but now that the Supreme Court has barred colleges from considering race, they’re simply untenable. The presidents of elite colleges face a diversity test this summer. Here’s hoping they pass it.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/now-is-the-time-to-end-legacy-admissions