President Donald Trump has been attacking American universities on a host of fronts, pressuring schools to end their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, cutting National Institutes of Health research grants, and threatening to increase the endowment tax. One thing he hasn’t touched? The deeply troubling practice of legacy preferences, which provide a large admissions boost to the children of alumni. Trump says he stands for “merit,” but he’s done nothing to curb a practice that piles additional advantages on the already advantaged.
Legacy preferences are a sordid business, which began in the early 20th century as an effort to cap Jewish enrollment at selective college. I had a chance to observe closely how these preferences work when I served as an expert witness in lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina for using race in admissions. As I outline in my new book, “Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges,” I testified that racial diversity is important for college campuses, and that universities could create that diversity without racial preferences if they eliminated favoritism for wealthy (mostly white) applicants and boosted the admissions chances of working-class students of all races.
Harvard had long claimed that legacy preferences were a mere “tiebreaker” among equally qualified candidates, but an internal study I cited as part of my court report found that legacies received a 40% boost in admissions, meaning a student with a 15% chance of admissions as a nonlegacy had around a 55% chance if he or she were a legacy.
