Democrats are taking aim at the common practice of giving a leg up to the children of alumni and donors in the college admissions practice as a key plank of their response to the conservative Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions.
The party seems to be coalescing behind the elimination of legacy admissions as it looks for a way to respond to the ruling. Representatives of the influential Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus all endorsed the idea on a call with reporters on Thursday afternoon, and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) are set to introduce legislation eliminating the practice soon.
Studies have shown eliminating legacy preferences, which inherently favor those whose parents went to college or come from wealthy backgrounds, would do relatively little to change the demographic makeup of college enrollments, however, and Democrats and the White House are also looking at other ways to respond to the ruling.
President Joe Biden, speaking shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court’s dual rulings striking down the affirmative action practices of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, did not directly call for the elimination of legacy admissions, though he argued that college admissions are tilted against the working class.
“Today, for too many schools, the only people who benefit from the system are the wealthy and the well-connected. The odds have been stacked against working people for much too long,” Biden said. “We need a higher education system that works for everyone, from Appalachia to Atlanta.”
The White House said it would work with the departments of Education and Justice to help inform colleges about the ways they can still consider race in college admissions and would host a summit next month for college leaders to discuss how to maintain diverse student bodies.
John Minchillo/Associated Press
None of those steps is likely to generate as much controversy as eliminating legacy and donor admissions, which colleges are likely to fiercely defend. Many universities rely on the practice to help lure in donations from alumni and wealthy, status-seeking parents.
“It’s unfair to have 25% of your admissions to be based on donations or whether your parents went to that school. To continue that at this point has to be called into question,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), the chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) echoed the point. “If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous “colorblindness” claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged,” she wrote on Twitter.
The effect of legacy admissions can be major: Some top universities accept more legacy students each year than Black and Latino students combined, and studies have estimated the value of having an alumni parent is equal to an increase of 160 points on an applicant’s SAT score.
For example, data revealed in the lawsuit against Harvard found that recruited athletes, legacies, children of donors and children of faculty and staff make up 43% of the student body, compared with just 16% for Black students, Latino students and Asian American students combined.
Still, a Duke University study looking at that data found simply eliminating legacy and donor admissions would improve racial and economic diversity but that the “increase in diversity resulting from the elimination of legacy and athlete preferences pales in comparison to the diversity benefits stemming from racial preferences.”
Notably, the admissions policies in question at Harvard and UNC looked at race as one of a number of factors. Others were legacy and recruited athlete status. The other admissions factors, beyond race, remain untouched by the ruling.
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee, said those practices have become indefensible in a world without affirmative action to balance them, comparing them to the infamous “grandfather clauses” used to prevent Black citizens from voting after the Civil War.
“It’s the same discriminatory effect that the grandfather clause had on voting,” Scott said. “The grandfathers and great-grandfathers are much more likely to be white.”
Scott said he would ask Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate other practices he thought had a racially discriminatory effect on admissions, including racially biased standardized testing.
Michael Dannenberg, a former education policy aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and a Department of Education official in President Barack Obama’s administration, backed other ideas in a recent Slate essay, including requiring wealthy colleges and universities to fund either historically black institutions or community colleges if they do not admit enough working-class applicants.
