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Tag: Students for Fair Admissions

  • SFFA Urges Colleges to Shield ‘Check Box’ Data About Race From Admissions Officers

    SFFA Urges Colleges to Shield ‘Check Box’ Data About Race From Admissions Officers

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    The Supreme Court outlawed the use of race in admissions last month, but the scrutiny of colleges’ responses to the landmark ruling is just beginning.

    Students for Fair Admissions made that clear on Tuesday when it sent a stern letter to 150 public and private colleges citing several passages from the court’s majority opinion, including its emphasis that the law requires “color-blind” admissions practices: “It is therefore incumbent upon your institutions to ensure compliance with this decision.”

    The letter, which was signed “Sincerely yours,” by Edward Blum, SFFA’s founder, instructed colleges to take four specific actions. One was to stop making “check box” data about applicants’ race available to admissions officers.

    You remember the check box, right? It came up again and again during oral arguments last fall. Lawyers for SFFA argued that admissions officers shouldn’t be able to consider which box applicants check on applications to note their race and ethnicity. The consideration of “race by itself,” one of those lawyers told the court, was unlawful. And in the end, the court’s majority agreed with that.

    But does that mean colleges now must remove the check box from their admissions applications?

    Art Coleman, co-founder and managing partner at EducationCounsel LLC, was asked that question during The Chronicle’s recent webinar about the implications of the court’s ruling. “Nothing should stop an institution from collecting the information,” he said. “There’s just nothing in the opinion that suggests that. … There are important reasons to take that data and evaluate it for educational purposes that affect all students. The question, legally, is: How are you using that information in the context of making decisions about whether a student is admitted or not?”

    EducationCounsel, a consulting firm that advises colleges on legal issues, has published a working draft of its preliminary guidance on complying with the court’s decision. “The mere collection of disaggregated data based on race and ethnicity should remain as a viable, lawful practice,” it said.

    That guidance also included the following: “It is important to segregate such collection practices from any effort to monitor class composition in real time with respect to rolling or other admissions practices, by which awareness of evolving class racial composition might influence the admissions decisions being made. In other words, maintain a clear separation between information accessible to those who are building an applicant pool and those involved in the individual applicant decision-making process.”

    The check box is a powerful symbol. It has long figured prominently in the debate over race-conscious admissions. Critics of the practice, either in ignorance or a willful attempt to mislead, have helped popularize the widely held notion that underrepresented minority applicants gained admission to highly selective colleges merely by checking a box to indicate their race. But in holistic evaluations of applicants, race was one of many factors colleges considered — and just one.

    The check box has remained a subject of considerable attention as colleges prepared to adjust their practices in anticipation of the court’s decision. This spring, the Common Application, the online platform used by more than a million students each year to apply to college, announced that it would allow its 1,000-plus member institutions to hide information about students’ race and ethnicity starting in August, but applicants may still choose to answer those voluntary questions. Member colleges already can hide information about an applicant’s birthday, gender, Social Security number, and test scores.

    The court’s ruling has prompted confusion about the purpose of the check box now that colleges can’t consider an applicant’s race. “It’s a confusing issue because the assumption is that if it’s there, people will use it” in admissions decisions, said W. Carson Byrd, an associate research scientist at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “So the question people have is: If you don’t use it, then why do you need it?”

    But that demographic data has many uses beyond evaluations of applicants for admission. “It’s helpful for understanding who’s applying,” said Byrd, who described the importance of such data in an op-ed for the Times Higher Education on Wednesday. “If we start to see a dramatic decrease in in-state students who are Black and Latino, there are going to be questions about what it was that made them decide that this wasn’t the place for them. These are really important kinds of questions. If you don’t have basic data about who these students are, you can’t really make any adjustments, you can’t make any programmatic changes or policy changes.”

    This is what their endgame is — to literally get rid of data on race.

    SFFA’s letter arrived during an especially anxious period for higher education. Throughout the nation, admissions and enrollment officials are huddling behind closed doors with general counsels and other administrators to make sense of the court’s decision, determine how to adjust their policies, and insulate their institutions from lawsuits as best they can.

    Some admissions officials on Wednesday privately described SFFA’s letter as an attempt to bully and intimidate colleges into making changes that the court’s decision doesn’t necessarily compel them to make. The letter also instructed colleges “to prohibit your admissions office from preparing or reviewing any aggregated data (i.e., data involving two or more applicants) regarding race or ethnicity; eliminate any definition or guidance regarding ‘underrepresented’ racial groups; promulgate new admissions guidelines that make clear race is not to be a factor in the admission or denial of admission to any applicant.”

    When asked via email if a specific incident or concern had prompted the letter, Blum wrote: “It’s common in various legal settings.”

    No one should mistake SFFA’s letter for a list of legal commandments handed down from on high. Later this summer, the U.S. Education Department plans to issue federal guidance for complying with the court’s ruling. That document will provide specific advice on how colleges should adjust institutional practices to meet new race-neutral requirements.SFFA’s letter, on the other hand, was a growl from one of higher education’s self-appointed watchdogs.

    But Byrd saw a deeper implication in what the group wrote. “This is what their endgame is — to literally get rid of data on race,” he said. “If we know that we have a lot of racial inequality, one of the ways we know whether something is getting better or worse is being able to have this kind of data. So, really, this is meant to undercut the ability to make policy changes or cultural changes. You can’t point at something if you don’t have the data. That is their ultimate goal: to prevent people from pointing out that systemic racism is still an everyday reality for people.”

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    Eric Hoover

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  • With ‘Armageddon’ Looming, a Last Look at the Legal Fault Lines in Race-Conscious Admissions

    With ‘Armageddon’ Looming, a Last Look at the Legal Fault Lines in Race-Conscious Admissions

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    The Supreme Court is poised to decide the fate of race-conscious admissions policies, perhaps as soon as Thursday morning. Unless you’ve been stuck in a trustees meeting for the last decade, you know that most everyone expects Students for Fair Admissions to prevail. The group, known as SFFA, which sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill nine years ago, seeks to eliminate the use of race in admissions nationwide. And the court’s 6-3 conservative majority includes justices who have essentially sneered at the practice.

    While it’s easy to view Supreme Court decisions in terms of wins and losses, the conclusion here could include nuances that complicate, or even temper, the plaintiffs’ anticipated victory. Speaking at a recent enrollment conference, Art Coleman, a managing partner and co-founder of EducationCounsel LLC, described a handful of potential outcomes. “I care more, from a field perspective, about how a party wins or loses here almost than I do about who wins or loses,” Coleman said. “SFFA could prevail, but they could prevail on such narrow, idiosyncratic grounds that the implications for other institutions may not be that dramatic. Or they could prevail with, as I have termed it, Armageddon … where the court literally wipes out all past authority and says, under no set of circumstances can you consider race in admissions.” So, the particulars of an SFFA win will determine just how big a defeat supporters of race-conscious admissions will have to stomach.

    On the cusp of the Supreme Court’s decision, The Chronicle invites you to revisit Halloween 2022. During oral arguments in the Harvard and UNC cases that day, the nine justices and lawyers for all parties spent five grueling hours discussing the Constitution, holistic admissions practices, and the meaning of checking a box to indicate one’s race. What the justices said on the last day in October might or might not have telegraphed the thrust of the majority’s forthcoming opinions. But several exchanges illuminated some crucial fault lines in the age-old debate over race-conscious admissions.

    Let’s take a last look back at some key questions that might shape the Supreme Court’s decision.

    Is the Constitution meant to be colorblind in all ways, no matter what?

    Yes, SFFA’s lawyers told the Supreme Court. They argued that the nation’s most sacred document requires colorblindness in all federal laws, a notion that derives from a particular reading of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “the equal protection of the laws” to all U.S. citizens. During oral arguments in the UNC case, Patrick Strawbridge said “racial classifications are wrong,” and later added that, “just considering race and race alone is not consistent with the Constitution.” And Cameron T. Norris, representing the plaintiffs in the Harvard case, said this: “The framers of the 14th Amendment saw it as a ban on all racial classifications.”

    But that’s flat-out wrong, said Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the U.S. solicitor general. She pushed back on the plaintiffs’ argument that the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka compelled it to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 decision that upheld the limited consideration of race as one of many factors in admissions. “There is a world of difference between the situation the court confronted in Brown, the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine that was designed to exclude African Americans based on notions of racial inferiority and subjugate them … a world of difference between that and the university policies at issue in this case, which are not intended to exclude anyone on the basis of race or even to benefit particular racial groups … but to bring individuals of all races together so that they can all learn together and benefit from that diverse educational environment.”

    SFFA, Prelogar said, lacked evidence to support “this colorblind interpretation of the Constitution that would make all racial classifications automatically unconstitutional.” And according to this incisive analysis from Vox, the colorblind-or-bust idea is flawed: “The Congress that wrote the 14th Amendment … rejected the ‘color-blind’ theory, and instead wrote a landmark civil rights statute that explicitly requires the government to consider race when deciding whether a non-white individual’s rights were fully respected.”

    Is it OK to invite applicants to check a box indicating their race and ethnicity?

    The act of checking a box came up again and again during oral arguments. “What we object to,” one of SFFA’s lawyers said, “is a consideration of race and race by itself.” And for hours several Justices repeatedly zeroed in on the question of whether it was legally problematic for colleges to ask applicants to note their race and ethnicity — and to consider that information in evaluations.

    Chief Justice John G. Roberts asked one of SFFA’s lawyers a question that distinguished between applicants checking a box to disclose their race and ethnicity, and writing an essay about how their race had informed their experiences: “Would you have any objection, if you do not ask candidates for admission to check a box what their race is, but you are allowed to take into consideration what an applicant would say in an essay about having to confront discrimination growing up?”

    The lawyer’s reply: “Absolutely not. … We really are, in this case, talking about the check box.”

    Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined in, asking a lawyer for UNC, “Why do you give a student the opportunity to say this one thing about me, I’m Hispanic, I’m African American, I’m Asian? What does that in itself tell you?” And Justice Alito also asked a lawyer for SFFA to consider the hypothetical case of an African immigrant who moved to an predominantly white part of North Carolina. Would it be permissible to consider the student’s essay about dealing with “huge cultural differences”?

    Probably, the lawyer said, “because the preference in that case is not being based upon the race but upon the cultural experiences or the ability to adapt or the fact of encountering a new language in a new environment.” And that prompted Justice Elena Kagan to interject with one of the most memorable lines of the day: “The race is part of the culture and the culture is part of the race, isn’t it? I mean, that’s slicing the baloney awfully thin.”

    Her comment drew laughs. It also underscored an apparent inconsistency in the plaintiffs’ argument against race-conscious admissions: They’re seeking to undo Grutter, which affirmed that colleges could consider an applicant’s race as one factor among many within the context of their entire application. And yet during oral arguments, SFFA’s lawyers offered no real objections to specific examples of the holistic considerations of race that Grutter allows. This amicus brief in support of Harvard and UNC distills the situation succinctly: “Either admissions officers can consider an applicant’s story, inclusive of their experiences and perspectives that may be directly associated with an applicant’s race, or they cannot.”

    Achieving diversity and diverse student populations in universities has been difficult. What if it continues to be difficult in another 25 years?

    Did the Grutter decision really have a 25-year expiration date?

    Writing for the Court in Grutter, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor offered a hopeful rendering of the future: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in the benefits of student diversity] approved today.” But does that mean that the court’s decision should … expire by 2028?

    SFFA’s lawyers said, in so many words, that time’s up for colleges that consider race. And the court’s conservative justices seemed to agree. Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Ryan Y. Park, a lawyer for UNC, to say when it would stop using race in admissions: “Achieving diversity and diverse student populations in universities has been difficult. What if it continues to be difficult in another 25 years? … What are you saying when you’re up here in 2040? Are you still defending it like this is just indefinite, it’s going to keep going on?”

    Park said, “it’s a dial, not a switch,” and that he expected that the university would be able to “dial it down to zero.” In response to another justice’s question about phasing out race, he said: “We don’t read the 25-year as some sort of strict expiration.”

    Prelogar fielded several questions about the Grutter decision’s supposed expiration date. “Diversity in higher education,” she said, “is absolutely a compelling interest and it will remain so. That is constant. That’s not going to change. But our society is going to change in ways that enable more and more universities and colleges to try to achieve the benefits of educational diversity without having to take race explicitly into account.”

    “Grutter gave us a number,” Roberts said. “Are you going to give us a number?”

    “I can’t give you a number,” Prelogar said. “But I can say that I think that our society has made some progress toward that goal.”

    Roberts pushed her for an answer.

    “It would be incorrect as a matter of constitutional principle,” Prelogar said, “to … understand Grutter to have set a firm expiration date on the nature of the compelling interest here.”

    The conservative justices’ apparent impatience with such answers was palpable.

    Do the educational benefits of diversity justify the limited use of race in admissions?

    Grutter affirmed that the only legally sound rationale for considering race in admissions is to achieve the educational benefits of diversity that, its supporters often say, “flow” when people from different backgrounds are mixed together.

    Yet several justices seemed skeptical of this idea, in part because those benefits can prove difficult to measure. Justice Clarence Thomas expressed confusion about the very meaning of the word “diversity.” When pressing a lawyer for UNC, he said, “you still haven’t given me the educational benefits … when a parent sends a kid to college, that they don’t necessarily send them there to have fun or feel good or anything like that; they send them there to learn physics or chemistry or whatever they’re studying.”

    David G. Hinojosa, a lawyer representing student respondents in the UNC case, rattled off numerous educational benefits of diversity. Fostering innovation. Reducing stereotypes. Preparing young people to live and work in a diverse society.

    But do those benefits justify the use of race in admissions? No, argued Strawbridge, the lawyer for SFFA. The problem, he said, is that Grutter suggests that “this is somehow costless, that it’s one factor among many and we can’t identify, you know, exactly how many points race is getting. … It’s always a plus factor and never a negative. But this is a zero-sum game.”

    Justice Alito picked up that thread: “What is your response to the simple argument that college admissions is a zero-sum game? And if you give a plus to a person who falls within the category of underrepresented minority but not to somebody else, you’re disadvantaging the latter student?”

    Hinojosa disagreed with that characterization. Even when race is a plus factor for a given applicant, he said, a college is “looking at the whole applicant … their whole application and their résumé.”

    This exchange revealed a fundamental tension between those who see selective admissions as a simple equation in which one applicant’s plus is another applicant’s minus — and those who see its as a complex, individualized evaluation of numerous factors all at once.

    We’re entertaining a rule in which some people can say the things they want about who they are and have that valued in the system, but other people are not going to be able to.

    What would happen if colleges were barred from considering some aspects of one student’s application but not another’s?

    Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that barring race-conscious admissions programs could pose a different kind of legal problem for the court down the line. In response to an SFFAs lawyer, she said: “What I’m worried about is that the rule that you’re advocating, that in the context of a holistic review process, a university can take into account and value all of the other background and personal characteristics of other applicants but they can’t value race. … That seems to me to have the potential of causing more of an equal-protection problem than it’s actually solving.”

    Justice Jackson proposed a hypothetical involving two applicants to UNC. The first writes an essay conveying their hope of becoming a fifth-generation graduate of the university; the second explains that they’re descended from enslaved people who never had a chance to attend UNC. Both applicants wish to honor their families’ legacies by enrolling at the university.

    “The first applicant would be able to have his family background considered and valued by the institution as part of its consideration of whether or not to admit him,” Justice Jackson said, “while the second one wouldn’t be able to because his story is in many ways bound up with his race and with the race of his ancestors. … We’re entertaining a rule in which some people can say the things they want about who they are and have that valued in the system, but other people are not going to be able to because they won’t be able to reveal that they are Latino or African American or whatever. And I’m worried that that creates an inequity in the system with respect to being able to express your identity and, importantly, have it valued by the university when it is considering the goal of bringing in different people. Is that a crazy worry?”

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    Eric Hoover

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  • As Race-Conscious Admissions Policies Go Before the Supreme Court, Here’s What 6 Experts Are Listening For

    As Race-Conscious Admissions Policies Go Before the Supreme Court, Here’s What 6 Experts Are Listening For

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    The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in two cases that challenge colleges’ consideration of race in admissions decisions — one against Harvard College, the other against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The outcomes of the cases, which have been making their way through the court system since 2014, could decide the fate of race-conscious admissions in America. Legal observers believe that the now-conservative court may seize the opportunity to end the practice altogether.

    The Chronicle asked six legal and higher-education experts to share one key thing that they will be watching for during the arguments on Monday and to explain why that could be pivotal. These are not predictions but informed thoughts from people who have been watching the cases for about nine years.

    Liliana M. Garces, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies how legal and education systems shape educational opportunity.

    These cases represent a conflict in America over how to address racial discrimination and promote equal access and opportunity in higher education. I’ll be watching for how the justices debate this question as they consider how to interpret the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

    A special report on the imperiled future of race-conscious admissions.

    For 44 years, the court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause to allow for a limited consideration of race in admissions so that postsecondary institutions can promote educational opportunity and maintain racially and ethnically diverse campuses that are critical for their educational mission and for sustaining the health of our democracy. That’s an approach that says: We promote equal access and address racial discrimination — not by ignoring race, but by understanding how it shapes educational opportunity. The plaintiffs in these cases are asking the justices to change that interpretation under the fallacy that being conscious of race in admissions is the same as racial discrimination.

    Research consistently shows that not being able to consider race as one of many factors in admissions exacerbates racial inequities and allows racial discrimination to persist. We address racial discrimination by acknowledging how race matters in a student’s life, not by ignoring that reality.

    OiYan Poon, a visiting professor of education at the University of Maryland at College Park and co-author of Rethinking College Admissions: Research-Based Practice and Policy.

    I will be listening for how the justices and attorneys talk about Asian Americans in relationship to other students and people. Ed Blum and SFFA [Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff] are banking on the justices and the public to believe racist stereotypes about Asian Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinx people. Some think of Asian Americans as stereotypically and universally hardworking and book-smart, and other students of color as not being intelligent and hardworking — all flattened and dehumanizing concepts of who people are. We are all complex individuals whose educational journeys have been shaped by different local, social, and economic contexts.

    Race-conscious holistic admissions practices allow admissions professionals to affirm individual students’ unique backgrounds and stories. Diversity matters to education and to a healthy democracy. Research has shown that Asian Americans benefit from race-conscious admissions and that the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action and haven’t fallen for SFFA’s divisive rhetoric. Will education research and the majority perspective of Asian Americans matter to the justices?

    Joshua Dunn, a professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

    Of the two cases, I think Harvard has a better chance, although still a small one, of winning. To do that, they will have to peel off two conservative votes, so I’m going to closely watch how their counsel tries to persuade some of the conservative wing that they are not engaging in pernicious discrimination, or how even if that bloc has concerns about Harvard’s policies, that they should be more concerned about empowering greater federal control of private institutions. For the former, that will require them to, I think, do better than their briefs do at explaining why Asian American applicants consistently receive lower “personal ratings” compared with other groups.

    The court struck down Michigan’s undergraduate admissions program in Gratz v. Bollinger because it was too “automatic” in awarding points to applicants from historically underrepresented groups. The personal ratings will likely strike the conservatives as being suspiciously automatic. For the latter, Harvard could try to appeal to the longstanding worries of conservatives about the homogenizing and centralizing effects of imposing national policies on private institutions. This, however, would require them to make arguments uncomfortably similar to the original opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But in the end, it might be their best hope.

    Art Coleman, managing partner at EducationCounsel LLC and a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

    I’m very interested in whether any member of the court elevates the issue of what, precisely, is on the table as the court considers the big question presented in these cases: whether higher-education institutions can continue to “use race as a factor in admissions.” Specifically, there is a potentially important distinction to be made between considering the racial status of an applicant and their identity — an applicant’s authentic, lived experience and perspective, evident through holistic review. (Even SFFA has said that applicants should be able to describe their experience of “overcoming discrimination” to which they’ve been subject.) As many amici [the friend-of-the-court briefs] representing higher-education organizations and institutions have explained, it is impossible to credibly conduct an authentic, complete holistic review of an applicant (regardless of their race) if that applicant cannot tell their full story, which may include facets of their background and interests associated with or informed by their racial or ethnic identity.

    If this court is inclined to be directionally sympathetic to SFFA’s major ask — that it reverse decades of court precedent regarding the consideration of race in admissions to advance diversity interests — will there be limits and lines to be drawn that expressly preserve the integrity of holistic review, as described above, consistent with core, conservative constitutional principles?

    Kimberly West-Faulcon, a professor of law at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, who researches constitutional law and antidiscrimination law.

    Since I do not expect many surprises in how the court splits on the constitutional interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause in the UNC case, I will be paying closest attention to whether the ruling in the SFFA v. Harvard case could further erode the efficacy of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which allows federal agencies to combat race discrimination by freezing federal funding to programs that exclude, deny benefits, or discriminate on the basis of race. Because I suspect there are several justices who wish to do to Title VI something similar to what the Supreme Court did in Shelby County v. Holder, when it gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I will be paying particular attention to whether any of the right-leaning justices seem interested in reinterpreting Title VI in the Harvard case.

    If the court leaves Title VI untouched, the fallout of this case is a bit more contained to the realm of selective university admissions. If it reinterprets Title VI, I think the future anti-civil-rights consequences of the ruling will reach far beyond who gets selected to attend colleges like Harvard.

    LaWanda W.M. Ward, an assistant professor of education at Pennsylvania State University, who researches higher education, civil rights, and race and ethnicity.

    For my dissertation I used Critical Race Theory to guide a critical discourse analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments for Bakke, Gratz, Grutter, Fisher I, and Fisher II. So, I am very interested in which justices will pose questions to the student intervenors’ counsel and what will those questions entail.

    In the previous race-conscious-admissions cases before the Supreme Court, it denied student representation in the oral arguments. I think the students’ advocacy — that will include experiences of students of Asian heritage to maintain race-conscious admissions — could be compelling, especially to the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was recently in higher education as a law professor. The court’s composition is different since it heard the Fisher cases, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia — very vocal and on vastly different ends of the constitutional debate — no longer on the bench. I’m most curious as to how Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will ask questions regarding arguments for a race-evasive approach to race-conscious admissions, because in oral argument for Merrill v. Milligan she recently challenged the dominant race-evasive legal narrative that the Roberts Court has established regarding interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

    The University of Michigan oral arguments [in the Gratz and Grutter cases] occurred on April Fool’s Day in 2003, I hope Halloween — which I associate with Michael Myers — has no significance for the cases on Monday.

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    Nell Gluckman and Eric Hoover

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  • ‘Everybody Hates Them’: Why One Researcher Says Legacy Preferences in Admissions Must End Soon

    ‘Everybody Hates Them’: Why One Researcher Says Legacy Preferences in Admissions Must End Soon

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    Legacy preferences in admissions have been around forever. So they might seem as permanent as any monument. But as recent history reminds us, sometimes monuments must fall.

    James S. Murphy puts it this way in a new report: “It is time for colleges and universities to catch up to the 1770s and say goodbye to what essentially amounts to an aristocratic system, in which a few children inherit a birthright advantage in a process that wraps itself up in the cloth of meritocracy.”

    It’s baked into the mythology of America: We don’t believe in aristocracy. And we think education is, in fact, the antidote to aristocracy.

    Murphy, a senior policy analyst at Education Reform Now, brings his researcher’s chops and writer’s voice to a longstanding debate: Is it right for colleges to give children of alumni a leg up in the admissions process? The question gained new urgency after the Supreme Court agreed this year to hear legal challenges to race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    If the highest court bars the use of race in admissions, as many experts predict it will, then selective colleges will have to reassess all of their admissions practices. And, Murphy argues, they will have an even greater moral obligation to scrap legacy preferences, which overwhelmingly benefit white, affluent students. Unless, of course, they want existing enrollment gaps between white and nonwhite students to grow even wider.

    Opposition to legacy preferences dates all the way back to the 1960s, as Murphy explains. Since then, Democratic and Republican politicians have taken aim at them (if any T-shirt could unite the right and left, it just might say “Ban Legacy Admissions Now!”). Murphy traces that history and offers an illuminating snapshot of the present, including a tally of colleges using legacy preferences (nearly 800 in 2020, or about half of all institutions that completed the Common Data Set).

    That’s a big number, but it’s getting smaller. In 2020, the Johns Hopkins University announced that it had stopped considering legacy status. The following year, Amherst College announced the same. Those institutions might seem like outliers, but Murphy’s research confirms that they’re not: Recent data, he found, show that dozens of colleges have abandoned the practice, only with little or no fanfare.

    Colleges aren’t so transparent about their use of legacy preferences. It took an epic lawsuit to pry loose the revelation that, as the report notes, the children of alumni at Harvard with the highest academic ratings are more than twice as likely to get an acceptance than low-income applicants with similar ratings. Among Murphy’s recommendations: The U.S. Department of Education should require disaggregated data reporting on the use of legacy preferences at each college, allowing the public to see how the practice affects various subgroups of students: “If the Supreme Court strikes down the use of race-conscious admissions policies in its current term, as is expected, disaggregated data will be essential for tracking the effects of that ruling in the years to come.”

    Recently, Murphy talked with The Chronicle about his research, the grip of aristocratic traditions on college admissions, and the intricacies of what he calls “a shameful practice.”

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Courtesy of James S. Murphy

    James S. Murphy

    Many experts predict that the Supreme Court will soon bar the use of race in admissions. If that happens, you write, it will be “absolutely necessary” for colleges to end legacy preferences. Why?

    One thing the Harvard case did was expose the influence of a range of admissions practices in college admissions, including legacy preferences. The other thing it did was make very clear just how important diversity is to highly selective colleges. That’s not to say other colleges don’t care about diversity. It’s just that it’s a more pointed issue at highly selective colleges, because the standards they set are very tilted in favor of wealth. And in American society, wealth is tilted toward white students. So it’s important to say that places like Harvard really have a strong commitment to racial and ethnic diversity. I don’t doubt that in any way whatsoever.

    One of the planks of the Students for Fair Admissions case was that Harvard hasn’t taken enough race-neutral steps to protect diversity or to enhance diversity on campus. While I think the SFFA argument about race is wrong, I do think they’re right that Harvard could go further. So if campuses are going to maintain the level of diversity they have, let alone enhance it, they’re absolutely going to have to chip away anything that gets in the way of diversity. And there’s just no debate about this: The numbers are there in the Harvard case, and they show clearly that legacy preferences favor white students.

    So a major shift in context — a land without race-conscious admissions — could have ripple effects.

    Six months ago, I don’t know that I thought that the likely outcome of the Harvard and UNC cases was going to have much impact on the use of legacy preferences. But as I thought about it, two things became apparent. One is that, from a practical perspective, colleges are going to have to look at anything they can to free up spots that are currently reserved for largely white, wealthy students.

    But then there’s the other ethical question, or the question of public perception. Come next June, if the Supreme Court says that colleges can no longer take into consideration a student’s race, which is an important part of a person’s whole being, it is almost impossible to imagine that colleges will then stand up and say, “Oh, but we’re fine with giving a preference to the children of our alumni.” It just becomes impossible, I think, to to say that without blushing, right?

    As you make clear in your brief, legacy preferences are unpopular, among the general public and among admissions leaders, who give them a major thumbs down.

    One of the findings of this study, not a big surprise at all, was that people hate legacy preferences. Seventy-five percent of Americans said legacy status should not be a factor in admissions, according to a Pew survey, which was reinforced by a recent Washington Post survey. The more surprising finding was the Inside Higher Education survey, where a large majority of admissions directors did not support the use of legacy preferences. So everybody hates them, even people working in colleges, except for alumni.

    I think the Supreme Court decision is going to give college presidents and boards the cover they need to do something that they know is the correct thing to do, and that they have probably wanted to do for a while. I don’t think that the presidents of Stanford, Yale, and Princeton looked at Johns Hopkins’s decision to drop legacy preferences and said, “Oh, what a terrible idea.” I suspect they were deeply jealous of their bravery.

    One eye-opening finding of yours is that 102 colleges have stopped considering legacy status since 2015, which, in most cases, seems to have happened rather quietly. Did that number surprise you? And what do you make of this trend?

    It did surprise me. The reason I wanted to look at that is because there’s a myth that legacy preferences are an intractable problem, that they’re so beneficial for universities that they’re going to fight to the death to hold on to them.

    The reality is I found that 80 percent of the 64 uberselective colleges — colleges that admit 25 percent or less of their applicants — do indeed offer legacy preferences. So when when Amherst did it, we were like, “OK, cool. But what about all these other liberal-arts colleges?” When Johns Hopkins did it, we were like “Cool. But what about all these other places?”

    Most places that drop legacy preferences don’t do it noisily. Going through the data, I identified 102 colleges, and a ton of them were state institutions. In many cases, the flagships had dropped the practice quietly, and did it with some thoughtfulness and consideration, because they had to tell somebody to go in and change the box from considered to not considered. That was really surprising to me, and it pushes back against this notion that this is an intractable practice, that we’re never going to get rid of it.

    Well, over 100 institutions have done so, they just haven’t all done so quite so loudly. I would like them to be louder and clearer about it. But that number also gave me hope that it would inspire similar confidence, especially in our public institutions. It’s shocking that any public college or university would provide a legacy preference. That’s a betrayal of their particular mandate to serve students in their state, where taxpayers are supporting them.

    Some college leaders have described legacy preferences as a means of building and sustaining a special kind of community over time, one that helps nourish the institution, maintain bonds, and so on. Duke’s president recently described this in terms of “family.” What’s your response to this rationale?

    It’s, at best, laughable. But honestly, I think it’s kind of grotesque because, as I write in the report, you’re talking about an institution that has a lot of wealth, that has a lot of power, that has a continuing influence on the broader society. When you confuse institutions like that with family, you’re not talking about college anymore, you’re talking about aristocracy.

    It’s baked into the mythology of America: We don’t believe in aristocracy. And we think education is, in fact, the antidote to aristocracy. This notion that by using legacy preferences, colleges are preserving a community or a family runs right in the face of that.

    I want to circle back to something you mention in the report: The tendency of some admitted legacy students who wonder if they deserved to get in. Does this reveal or suggest a truth about legacy preferences on a human level?

    There are many reasons to get rid of legacy preferences, and the basic question of justice and fairness is the main one. But I also think legacy preferences can be bad for the beneficiaries, and there’s been reporting on this. If you have been admitted knowing that your father and mother grandparents went there, and knowing that this helps you get in, there’s going to be lingering doubts. Do I belong here? Did I only get in because my parents went here?

    All college admissions officers, presidents boards and trustees want students to feel like they belong on campus, right? They want them to feel part of it. Let’s go back to that word “community.” The irony is that legacy preferences can undermine that very principle of community, of family, of belonging, that defenders of the practice are trying to invoke as a reason to use legacy preference. It can have the opposite effect.

    So it seems like the bottom-line question here is this: Knowing what we know in 2022, can an institution truly claim that it stands for racial equity and socioeconomic diversity if it gives preferences to legacies?

    I hope that is the question they ask themselves. And I hope the answer they arrive at is No. Because the correct answer is that you cannot possibly stand up for this preference if you also think your mission is to create a diverse campus that will benefit every single student on that campus and prepare them for the workplace.

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    Eric Hoover

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