Selective admissions is in crisis.
That was the message conveyed by organizers of an admissions conference in Los Angeles this week. It was the first time the conference, hosted by the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice, had convened since the Varsity Blues scandal erupted last March — adding celebrity gossip, a master schemer, and stories about rich people gaming the system to our collective understanding of selective admissions. At USC, an athletics administrator and several coaches were indicted.
The scandal seemed to confirm the suspicions of many that the admissions system is rigged to the advantage of families that are already privileged. But those suspicions have always been there.
“Long before the scandal hit, years before Harvard was sued for its affirmative-action admissions policy,” and even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision, Robert J. Massa, a longtime admissions leader, said, “colleges and universities favored students of privilege.”
One of the most prominent — and, in some circles, loathed — ways institutions do that is through legacy preferences, giving the children of alumni an edge in admissions. This month, the Johns Hopkins University disclosed that over the past decade or so it had stopped legacy admissions entirely, and taken other steps to help diversify its student body.
“This is about building our student-affairs resources,” said David Phillips, whose role as vice provost for admissions and financial aid has coincided with the end of legacy preferences. “In admissions and financial aid,” he said, “it’s about learning how to recruit high-achieving students from different backgrounds and understanding what high achievement looks like in different backgrounds.”
Over the last decade, the university has seen some results. In 2019, 15.1 percent of its incoming class were in the first generation of their families to go to college and 32.5 percent were students who identify as black, African American, Hispanic, Native American, Native Alaskan, or Pacific Islander, according to data provided to The Chronicle by Hopkins. Compare that with 10 years earlier, when 7.1 percent of the incoming class were first-generation students and 13.9 percent were underrepresented-minority students.
“In this move to diversify our class, we’ve also raised the bar on the level of students we have at Hopkins,” Phillips said. “Too often there can be a sentiment that somehow diversity and excellence are opposed. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
The end of legacy admissions is not the only factor that changed in the university’s demographics. In fact, one of the most salient critiques of ending legacy admissions as a solution is that it won’t actually solve very much. Taking away the extra point in their favor wouldn’t change the fact that children of selective colleges’ alumni probably have more resources — wealthy school districts, tutoring, and private counselors — that maximize their chances of admission. Tweaking just one dial wouldn’t open the gates to the less advantaged.
But one reason to do it, Hopkins administrators said, is for the signal it sends to the public.
“It’s a piece of broader messaging to say, We value students from many different backgrounds,” Phillips said. “It’s one important way to get the message out that gives credence to that concept.”
It’s not clear that prospective students pay attention to whether colleges give preferences to legacy applicants, according to Sara Urquidez, executive director of the Academic Success Program, a nonprofit group in Dallas that provides college advisers to public high schools.
“Truthfully I don’t think that’s something that hits our students’ radar that often,” she said. But the people at whom it might be directed, she said, are college counselors who help students through the process.
There is something, though, that Urquidez’s students do pay close attention to — a factor that directly affects their perceptions of higher education and the admissions process:
“They’re concerned about paying for college.”
