CBS MoneyWatch
November 15, 2011 9:33 AM
(MoneyWatch)
COMMENTARY. Should legacy applicants at Ivy League schools continue to enjoy an edge over everybody else?
I think most people -- except perhaps parents with an Ivy League pedigree -- would agree that giving a college admission boost to such "legacies," or family of alumni, is unfair.
The issue of alumni favoritism is bound to resurface in the coming months if the U.S. Supreme Court goes ahead, as expected, and reviews the constitutionality of affirmative action at colleges and universities. I wrote about this likelihood here: Is the End Nearing for Affirmative Action at Universities?
Full Story: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57324527/ivy-league-legacies-due-for-court-scrutiny/
Showing posts with label legacy admissions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label legacy admissions. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Affirmative Action for the Rich
The New York Times
by Richard Kahlenberg
November 13, 2011
While affirmative action policies for students of color have been the subject of countless books, lawsuits, and voter initiatives, much less attention has been paid to legacy preferences, which benefit a larger number of students. It’s time for the scrutiny to increase and the policies to end.
Rewarding birth rather than merit is un-American and possibly illegal.
Legacy preferences provide the equivalent of a 160 point boost on the math and verbal SATs, not the “tiebreaker” that many universities claim . These preferences disproportionately benefit wealthy white students, providing, in essence, affirmative action for the rich.
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/11/13/why-do-top-schools-still-take-legacy-applicants/affirmative-action-for-the-rich
by Richard Kahlenberg
November 13, 2011
While affirmative action policies for students of color have been the subject of countless books, lawsuits, and voter initiatives, much less attention has been paid to legacy preferences, which benefit a larger number of students. It’s time for the scrutiny to increase and the policies to end.
Rewarding birth rather than merit is un-American and possibly illegal.
Legacy preferences provide the equivalent of a 160 point boost on the math and verbal SATs, not the “tiebreaker” that many universities claim . These preferences disproportionately benefit wealthy white students, providing, in essence, affirmative action for the rich.
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/11/13/why-do-top-schools-still-take-legacy-applicants/affirmative-action-for-the-rich
Monday, May 2, 2011
The Decline of Legacy Admissions at Yale
The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 29, 2011, 5:31 pm
By Richard Kahlenberg
Yesterday morning, I participated in a panel discussion at New York University on admission preferences for legacy candidates with Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of admissions at Yale, and Dan Golden of Bloomberg News. Ann Marcus from the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at NYU moderated. (Jenny Anderson has a write up in The New York Times‘ “Choice” blog here).
Brenzel, to his credit, gave only a qualified defense of legacy preferences and provided some interesting data about the substantial decline in legacy admissions at Yale over time. In 1939, he said, legacies (defined as children of Yale college graduates) made up 31.4 percent the enrolled class at Yale. Today, they make up 8.7 percent. (Including the children of Yale alumni of professional and graduate schools adds a few percentage points to these totals.)
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-decline-of-legacy-admissions-at-yale/29338?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Full Story:
April 29, 2011, 5:31 pm
By Richard Kahlenberg
Yesterday morning, I participated in a panel discussion at New York University on admission preferences for legacy candidates with Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of admissions at Yale, and Dan Golden of Bloomberg News. Ann Marcus from the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy at NYU moderated. (Jenny Anderson has a write up in The New York Times‘ “Choice” blog here).
Brenzel, to his credit, gave only a qualified defense of legacy preferences and provided some interesting data about the substantial decline in legacy admissions at Yale over time. In 1939, he said, legacies (defined as children of Yale college graduates) made up 31.4 percent the enrolled class at Yale. Today, they make up 8.7 percent. (Including the children of Yale alumni of professional and graduate schools adds a few percentage points to these totals.)
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-decline-of-legacy-admissions-at-yale/29338?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Full Story:
Thursday, January 6, 2011
At Elite Colleges, Legacy Status Counts More Than Was Previously Thought, Study Finds
The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 5, 2011
By Elyse Ashburn
Family connections help you get into college. And a new paper suggests that at highly selective colleges, they may count even more than was previously thought.
A researcher at Harvard University recently examined the impact of legacy status at 30 highly selective colleges and concluded that, all other things being equal, legacy applicants got a 23.3-percentage-point increase in their probability of admission. If the applicants' connection was a parent who attended the college as an undergraduate, a "primary legacy," the increase was 45.1-percentage points.
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Legacys-Advantage-May-Be/125812/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
January 5, 2011
By Elyse Ashburn
Family connections help you get into college. And a new paper suggests that at highly selective colleges, they may count even more than was previously thought.
A researcher at Harvard University recently examined the impact of legacy status at 30 highly selective colleges and concluded that, all other things being equal, legacy applicants got a 23.3-percentage-point increase in their probability of admission. If the applicants' connection was a parent who attended the college as an undergraduate, a "primary legacy," the increase was 45.1-percentage points.
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Legacys-Advantage-May-Be/125812/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Legacy Racket: The Problem With College Admission Preferences For Children Of Alumni
The Century Foundation
Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Century Foundation, 9/22/2010
The use of race-based affirmative action in higher education has given rise to hundreds of books and law review articles, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the practice. By contrast, surprisingly little has been said or written or done to challenge a larger, longstanding “affirmative action” program that tends to benefit wealthy whites: legacy preferences for children of alumni.1 Like racial preferences, preferences for legacies can be criticized for being based on ancestry rather than individual merit, yet they offer none of the countervailing benefits of affirmative action, such as remedying past discrimination or promoting educational diversity. Download the Issue Brief.
http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=2763
Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Century Foundation, 9/22/2010
The use of race-based affirmative action in higher education has given rise to hundreds of books and law review articles, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the practice. By contrast, surprisingly little has been said or written or done to challenge a larger, longstanding “affirmative action” program that tends to benefit wealthy whites: legacy preferences for children of alumni.1 Like racial preferences, preferences for legacies can be criticized for being based on ancestry rather than individual merit, yet they offer none of the countervailing benefits of affirmative action, such as remedying past discrimination or promoting educational diversity. Download the Issue Brief.
http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=2763
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Five myths about college admissions
The Washington Post
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Sunday, May 23, 2010
This spring, more than 3 million students will graduate from America's high schools, and more than 2 million of them will head off to college in the fall. At the top colleges, competition has been increasingly fierce, leaving many high school seniors licking their wounds and wondering what they did "wrong." But do selective colleges and universities do a good job of identifying the best and brightest? And is the concern about who gets into the best colleges justified?
1. Admissions officers have figured out how to reward merit above wealth and connections.
A 2004 Century Foundation study found that at the most selective universities and colleges, 74 percent of students come from the richest quarter of the population, while just 3 percent come from the bottom quarter. Rich kids can't possibly be 25 times as likely to be smart as poor kids, so wealth and connections must still matter.
Leading schools have two main admissions policies that favor wealthy students. The more glaring of these is legacy preferences -- an admissions boost for the children of alumni.
Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/21/AR2010052101847.html
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Sunday, May 23, 2010
This spring, more than 3 million students will graduate from America's high schools, and more than 2 million of them will head off to college in the fall. At the top colleges, competition has been increasingly fierce, leaving many high school seniors licking their wounds and wondering what they did "wrong." But do selective colleges and universities do a good job of identifying the best and brightest? And is the concern about who gets into the best colleges justified?
1. Admissions officers have figured out how to reward merit above wealth and connections.
A 2004 Century Foundation study found that at the most selective universities and colleges, 74 percent of students come from the richest quarter of the population, while just 3 percent come from the bottom quarter. Rich kids can't possibly be 25 times as likely to be smart as poor kids, so wealth and connections must still matter.
Leading schools have two main admissions policies that favor wealthy students. The more glaring of these is legacy preferences -- an admissions boost for the children of alumni.
Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/21/AR2010052101847.html
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The college admissions scam
The Boston Globe
By Neal Gabler January 10, 2010
NOW IS the winter of high school seniors’ discontent. But then every winter is one of discontent as seniors file their college applications with a mix of dread and hope - mainly dread. Those applying to the most selective schools have the odds stacked against them no matter how sterling their high school records, though college admissions officers typically offer the cold comfort that rejection is not equivalent to failure and that, as one Yale admissions officer put it, “It matters far less which strong college admits you than it matters what you do with your opportunities once you are there.’’ To which most high school seniors would say, “Hogwash.’’
They know that it does matter where you go to college, if not educationally then in terms of social recognition and opportunity. They know that America, for all its professions of meritocracy, is a virtual oligarchy where the graduates of the Ivies and the other best schools enjoy tremendous advantages in the job market. They know that Harvard or Stanford or MIT is a label in our “designer education’’ not unlike Chanel or Prada in clothes.
So here is another, more realistic comfort to those anxious seniors who will soon be flagellating themselves as unworthy: The admissions system of the so-called “best’’ schools is rigged against you. If you are a middle-class youth or minority from poor circumstances, you have little chance of getting in to one of those schools. Indeed, the system exists not to provide social mobility but to prevent it and to perpetuate the prevailing social order.
Of course, colleges loudly deny this since it undermines their exceptionality. Instead, universities will protest that the system is meritocratic; that they consider every applicant objectively; that the admissions process is “need blind,’’ which means that financial support plays no role in whether an applicant is admitted or not.
Most of these assertions, however, are nonsense. Of course the odds are stacked against every applicant since the best schools admit only a fraction of them (less than 10 percent for most of the Ivies and just above 25 percent for selective schools like Northwestern and Emory), but as Daniel Golden demonstrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the Wall Street Journal and then in his book, “The Price of Admission,’’ the so-called “best’’ schools give heavy preferences to the wealthy; as many as one-third of admissions, he writes, are flagged for special treatment at the elite universities, one-half at the elite liberal arts colleges, and the number of open spaces for the non-privileged is reduced accordingly. As Golden puts it, the privileged take so many spots that the “admissions odds against middle-class and working-class students with outstanding records are even longer than the colleges acknowledge.’’
Golden’s focus was on legacy admissions, which are essentially affirmative action for the rich and which provide huge advantages for applicants; on what are called special “development’’ applicants - thosewho do not qualify for admission under the ordinary criteria but whose parents have pledged large contributions to the school; and athletes who are, contrary to popular belief, not all poor ghetto kids adept at football and basketball, but are primarily wealthy white kids who are adept at lacrosse, rugby, crew and polo.
Full Story: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/10/the_college_admissions_scam/
By Neal Gabler January 10, 2010
NOW IS the winter of high school seniors’ discontent. But then every winter is one of discontent as seniors file their college applications with a mix of dread and hope - mainly dread. Those applying to the most selective schools have the odds stacked against them no matter how sterling their high school records, though college admissions officers typically offer the cold comfort that rejection is not equivalent to failure and that, as one Yale admissions officer put it, “It matters far less which strong college admits you than it matters what you do with your opportunities once you are there.’’ To which most high school seniors would say, “Hogwash.’’
They know that it does matter where you go to college, if not educationally then in terms of social recognition and opportunity. They know that America, for all its professions of meritocracy, is a virtual oligarchy where the graduates of the Ivies and the other best schools enjoy tremendous advantages in the job market. They know that Harvard or Stanford or MIT is a label in our “designer education’’ not unlike Chanel or Prada in clothes.
So here is another, more realistic comfort to those anxious seniors who will soon be flagellating themselves as unworthy: The admissions system of the so-called “best’’ schools is rigged against you. If you are a middle-class youth or minority from poor circumstances, you have little chance of getting in to one of those schools. Indeed, the system exists not to provide social mobility but to prevent it and to perpetuate the prevailing social order.
Of course, colleges loudly deny this since it undermines their exceptionality. Instead, universities will protest that the system is meritocratic; that they consider every applicant objectively; that the admissions process is “need blind,’’ which means that financial support plays no role in whether an applicant is admitted or not.
Most of these assertions, however, are nonsense. Of course the odds are stacked against every applicant since the best schools admit only a fraction of them (less than 10 percent for most of the Ivies and just above 25 percent for selective schools like Northwestern and Emory), but as Daniel Golden demonstrated in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the Wall Street Journal and then in his book, “The Price of Admission,’’ the so-called “best’’ schools give heavy preferences to the wealthy; as many as one-third of admissions, he writes, are flagged for special treatment at the elite universities, one-half at the elite liberal arts colleges, and the number of open spaces for the non-privileged is reduced accordingly. As Golden puts it, the privileged take so many spots that the “admissions odds against middle-class and working-class students with outstanding records are even longer than the colleges acknowledge.’’
Golden’s focus was on legacy admissions, which are essentially affirmative action for the rich and which provide huge advantages for applicants; on what are called special “development’’ applicants - thosewho do not qualify for admission under the ordinary criteria but whose parents have pledged large contributions to the school; and athletes who are, contrary to popular belief, not all poor ghetto kids adept at football and basketball, but are primarily wealthy white kids who are adept at lacrosse, rugby, crew and polo.
Full Story: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/10/the_college_admissions_scam/
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Looking to the Past to Ban Legacy Admissions
InsideHighered.com
November 20
When critics question legacy admissions — special preferences for the children of alumni — they tend to focus on fairness, not legality. Politicians and others have periodically asked why colleges should give any assistance to those who are more likely to have other advantages anyway, given that their parents were well educated.
But legal challenges have been few. In the 1980s, the U.S. Education Department considered complaints that legacy admissions systems discriminated against Asian American applicants, but ruled that this was not the case because, as more Asian Americans became graduates of elite colleges, their children would benefit much as the children of white alumni have benefited over time.
But this week — for the second time this year — a law journal is publishing a legal analysis that suggests that legacy preferences are illegal. The new issue of the Santa Clara Review features an article — whose lead writer would like to find plaintiffs to test his theory — arguing that the 1866 Civil Rights Act bars legacy admissions at public and private institutions. An article earlier this year in the Washington University Law Review argues that the “nobility clauses” of the U.S. Constitution ban legacy admissions at public institutions.
In both cases, the lawyers and legal scholars who wrote the articles say that the statutes they cite effectively bar hereditary advantages and that legacy admissions are such an advantage, even if the authors of the statutes weren’t thinking about how one gets into Harvard.
Several advocates for colleges that use legacy admissions said that they hadn’t heard of the latest arguments and so couldn’t comment on them. But it would be an understatement to say that colleges with legacy preferences generally don’t like to talk about them (except, perhaps during reunion weekend).
Full story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/20/legacy
November 20
When critics question legacy admissions — special preferences for the children of alumni — they tend to focus on fairness, not legality. Politicians and others have periodically asked why colleges should give any assistance to those who are more likely to have other advantages anyway, given that their parents were well educated.
But legal challenges have been few. In the 1980s, the U.S. Education Department considered complaints that legacy admissions systems discriminated against Asian American applicants, but ruled that this was not the case because, as more Asian Americans became graduates of elite colleges, their children would benefit much as the children of white alumni have benefited over time.
But this week — for the second time this year — a law journal is publishing a legal analysis that suggests that legacy preferences are illegal. The new issue of the Santa Clara Review features an article — whose lead writer would like to find plaintiffs to test his theory — arguing that the 1866 Civil Rights Act bars legacy admissions at public and private institutions. An article earlier this year in the Washington University Law Review argues that the “nobility clauses” of the U.S. Constitution ban legacy admissions at public institutions.
In both cases, the lawyers and legal scholars who wrote the articles say that the statutes they cite effectively bar hereditary advantages and that legacy admissions are such an advantage, even if the authors of the statutes weren’t thinking about how one gets into Harvard.
Several advocates for colleges that use legacy admissions said that they hadn’t heard of the latest arguments and so couldn’t comment on them. But it would be an understatement to say that colleges with legacy preferences generally don’t like to talk about them (except, perhaps during reunion weekend).
Full story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/20/legacy
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