America’s colleges are anxiously awaiting the outcome of a new federal Education Department investigation into Harvard University’s admissions policy for “legacy” students, wondering whether the time has come to do away with a policy that seems to chiefly benefit White students.
Legacy admissions, or special preferences given to students with relatives who attended the school, have come under new fire after the Supreme Court ruled in June that race-based affirmative action programs violate the Constitution.
Both supporters and opponents of affirmative action say it’s time to do away with legacy admissions.
“It is a puzzle why Harvard and dozens of other elite schools continue to give preferences for legacy applicants,” said Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, which brought the cases to the Supreme Court.
Plenty of other schools have come to the same conclusion in the wake of the high court rulings.
Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Occidental College in California ended legacy preferences last month, saying they wanted to remove “any potential barriers to access and opportunity.”
Both schools insisted legacy status never played much of a role in their decision-making.
Not so for Harvard, where College Transitions, a firm that helps students with school admissions, said the admission rate for legacies is five times that of non-legacies.
And Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in an opinion siding with the majority against Harvard’s race-based policy, said that in the wake of affirmative action, the school could still create just as diverse an environment as it has now by eliminating the use of legacy and donor preferences.
In some ways, though, Harvard may be a holdout.
Andrew Belasco, CEO of College Transitions, said as recently as five years ago, legacy admissions was a “significant advantage” at many schools. But as acceptance rates plummet, he said, the balance is shifting and legacy status is now reduced to something like a tie-breaker.
“There is definitely a trend of schools doing away with legacy admissions, and the Supreme Court case has served as an accelerant,” Mr. Belasco said. “I would expect more prominent schools to follow in the coming year.”
The Education Department’s investigation came after a civil rights complaint filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights, representing several racial and ethnic groups. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars racial discrimination in entities that receive significant federal funding, and the complaint says Harvard’s legacy policy is a hurdle for minorities in the admission process.
The Education Department confirmed publicly that it had opened the probe, but revealed little else.
Harvard didn’t respond to an inquiry for this story. The school declined to comment when the complaint was first filed.
Previously, Harvard defended legacy admissions as a way to keep alumni “engaged.” It also goes hand-in-hand with another policy that gives a leg up to children of financial donors to the school.
“Although alumni support Harvard for many reasons, the committee is concerned that eliminating any consideration of whether an applicant’s parent attended Harvard or Radcliffe would diminish this vital sense of engagement and support,” the school said in a private study, which became public during the court challenge to its affirmative action program.
John Agresto, former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and author of “The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do about It,” said that while ending racial preferences is right, schools — and particularly private institutions — should be able to rely on some non-merit yardsticks.
“Some may want to have stellar sports teams; some may want to keep up family traditions and honor alumni and their children; some (like HBCUs) may for justifiable reasons wish to recruit primarily within the Black community; some may wish to serve only women, or Catholics, or Iowans, or some group that they have historically served,” he said in an email to The Times.
“Private colleges should be given openness to fashion their character as best they see fit,” said Mr. Agresto, who is now a board member at the Jack Miller Center. “We talk ever so much about diversity these days, but eroding the distinctive character of our varied schools and colleges — so long as their distinctions are not covers for racial selectivity — potentially does more to harm the true and valued diversity of our colleges and universities than we should tolerate.”
A study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Harvard’s neighbor and itself a highly selective school that does not use legacy admissions — concluded that giving preference to relatives of alumni makes good financial sense for the schools.
For one thing, legacy applicants are more likely to accept offers of admission. And they are less likely to take financial aid. And legacies who graduate are more likely than non-legacies to donate in the future, the 2020 study said.
But the study, which looked at 16 years of data from top schools, also fueled the diversity concerns, pointing out that legacies generally weren’t “significantly more qualified” but did tend to be more White.
Whether that’s enough to sway the Education Department to declare the practice illegal at Harvard remains to be seen.
“It is the belief of most legal observers that legacy preferences are not illegal,” Mr. Blum told The Times. “If they were, it is likely the NAACP or other racial advocacy groups would have initiated litigation years ago.”
Mr. Belasco, though, said he expects the department to rule against Harvard.
“At a school like Harvard, legacy policies likely reduce the number of comparable (or more academically qualified) students of different ethnicities as well as students from lower-to-income families,” he wrote in an email.
• Alex Swoyer contributed to this story.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.