In deciding this month to end legacy admissions, Texas A&M University at College Station may have become a harbinger of similar changes at other higher-education institutions.
Texas A&M is the first public college to abandon a legacy policy under pressure from state lawmakers and minority-rights advocates. While its president, Robert M. Gates, said the university had been seriously considering the change even before its policy came under heavy attack as unfair to minority applicants, he openly lamented his failure to act sooner and spare his institution the negative publicity. In a statement announcing the change, he said that “public perceptions of the fairness and equity of our process clearly are important.”
Admissions policies that favor the relatives of alumni had already come under assault in the national political arena. In Congress, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has proposed legislation aimed at discouraging college-admissions offices from favoring the children of alumni. In the Democratic presidential race, Sen. John Edwards has vowed to bring an end to all legacy admissions.
In the wake of the Texas A&M controversy, which attracted widespread attention in the news media, many experts on higher-education policy predict that proposals to abolish legacy admissions will be taken up by legislatures in other states, or by governing boards of other public colleges.
“The Texas A&M decision is a significant straw in the wind,” says C. Peter Magrath, president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, which counts many selective public universities as members. “I personally have very low enthusiasm for legacy admissions. I understand why they exist. I don’t think they are inherently bad or evil. But I come out on the side that legacy admissions ought to become a legacy of the past and ought to be phased out.”
Like a lot of college traditions, admissions policies that favor the children of alumni are deeply entrenched. Politicians who want to rid colleges of such policies generally can expect to encounter staunch resistance from the institutions and their alumni.
Private colleges, where legacy preferences are most common, should have little trouble defending those policies, Mr. Magrath says. But the situation will be much different for selective public colleges, he says, given their obligation to serve taxpayers and their expressed commitment to high admissions standards. He predicts that more and more public institutions will be forced to abandon policies favoring the relatives of alumni.
Representatives of other national higher-education associations disagree that legacy policies are on the ropes. They express confidence that, in the long run, lawmakers will leave the policies intact, knowing that they help the institutions raise sorely needed funds from alumni, and that state governments aren’t likely to provide the institutions with big infusions of additional support anytime soon.
“I would not be writing the obituary of legacy admissions at public universities just yet,” says Travis J. Reindl, director of state-policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
Helping Alumni and Themselves
The debate over legacies in college admissions is muddied by the absence of reliable data on how prevalent such policies are. No group formally tracks which institutions consider applicants’ ties to alumni. While many colleges acknowledge the practice, most maintain that legacy status plays only a minimal role in admissions decisions.
It is rare, however, to find a private college that does not give some extra consideration to applicants who are the children or, in many cases, the grandchildren or siblings of alumni.
“Legacies have probably been part and parcel of every private college for more than a century,” says Sheldon E. Steinbach, vice president and general counsel at the American Council on Education, an umbrella group representing higher-education associations. “It sort of fits into the nature of private institutions, where you are paying more money to go, and they are expecting you to remain affiliated and give back to the institution.”
The University of Notre Dame stands out, even among private colleges, for the share of its undergraduate students who are the children of alumni: 23 percent. “Many of our alumni are very devoted to the school, and a natural outgrowth of that is that they want their children to go to the school,” says Matthew V. Storin, a university spokesman.
About 10 to 15 percent of the students on most Ivy League campuses are the children of alumni. Among such institutions, Harvard University accepts 40 percent of its undergraduate legacy applicants, compared with about 11 percent of its overall applicant pool. William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, says that the average SAT score for Harvard’s legacy admittees is just two points below that of all of its students, and that the legacy policy helps raise funds that “make it possible for Harvard to admit many students from moderate or low-income backgrounds.”
Among public colleges, legacy policies are found mainly at selective research universities, like Clemson University, the University of Florida, the University of Maryland at College Park, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Robert A. Seltzer, director of admissions at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says his institution gives “a slight edge” to applicants whose parents, grandparents, siblings, or spouses are alumni. But “if they are not qualified for admission,” he says, “being a legacy is not going to get them in.” And those applicants who are admitted as legacies appear to do every bit as well, academically, as their peers, he adds.
“Their parents are so enthusiastic, they push them,” Mr. Seltzer says.
Other institutions, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia, offer little extra consideration to in-state applicants who are related to alumni. Doing so, officials there believe, would be unfair to state taxpayers. But those universities do give legacy applicants a substantial edge when weighing applicants from other states against each other.
John A. Blackburn, dean of admission at Virginia, notes that “we are down to just 9 percent of our budget coming from the state” and calls the legacy admissions policy “very important” to the university’s efforts to raise money from other sources. Students who are admitted as legacies, he says, are much more likely than non-legacy students to contribute to the university later in life. In Virginia’s last major fund-raising campaign, which ended four years ago, 65.4 percent of legacy alumni donated, giving an average of nearly $34,800 each, compared with just 41.1 percent of non-legacy alumni, giving an average of about $4,100 each.
Legacies of Segregation
Both the University of California system and the University of Georgia have dropped legacy admissions policies in recent years, but under much different circumstances than Texas A&M’s.
California did not give extra consideration to the children of in-state alumni, but it treated legacy applicants from out of state as if they were California residents, giving them a significant edge over other out-of-state applicants. Officials abandoned that policy in the fall of 2000 after concluding that, as a result of growing out-of-state competition for seats at the university, the policy was giving those legacy students an increasingly disproportionate advantage over other non-Californians, says Hanan J. Eisenman, a university spokesman.
Georgia abandoned its policy of giving extra consideration to children of alumni in 2001, after losing a federal lawsuit challenging its use of affirmative action in undergraduate admissions. The university’s president, Michael F. Adams, made the change on the advice of a faculty committee assigned to overhaul admissions policies to comply with the court ruling.
“Certainly the notion of fairness was very much at issue,” recalls Delmer D. Dunn, vice president for instruction. “If you could not provide weight for one group, on what basis could you justify giving it to another group?”
Despite fears that abandoning the legacy policy would result in a decline in alumni support, “we have seen no impact of this decision upon the level of giving to the institution,” he says.
Throughout most of the nation, the debate over legacy admissions has been a byproduct of the legal and political debate over affirmative action on campus.
Last year, as the U.S. Supreme Court was deliberating over two lawsuits challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, lawyers from civil-rights organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund were threatening to file lawsuits challenging legacy policies if Michigan lost. When the Bush administration sided with those suing Michigan, many defenders of affirmative action pointed out that President George W. Bush himself appeared to have benefited from being a legacy. He was part of the third generation of his family to attend Yale University, and Yale accepted him despite a C average in high school and a mediocre SAT verbal score.
Some civil-rights organizations object to legacy admissions because such policies tend to work against minority students, who generally are underrepresented in the legacy applicant pool, especially at institutions in the South that were once racially segregated under the law.
At the University of Virginia, for example, the pool of legacies seeking early admissions for the fall of 2003 was 91 percent white, 1.6 percent black, 1.6 percent Asian, and 0.5 percent Hispanic. (Other students declined to state their race or ethnicity.) By comparison, the pool of early-admissions applicants without alumni ties was 73 percent white, 5.6 percent black, 9.3 percent Asian, and 3.5 percent Hispanic.
When students accepted through the regular admissions process were taken into account, Virginia ended up enrolling a student body that was about 75 percent white, 10 percent black, 12 percent Asian, and 3 percent Hispanic. Sarah E. Turner, an associate professor of education, analyzed the admissions data and determined that not until about 2020 would the racial composition of its alumni population—and, therefore, its pool of legacy applicants—have grown diverse enough to mirror the racial composition of the current student body.
Tumult in Texas
Texas A&M’s legacy came under attack largely as the result of President Gates’s decision, in December, not to return to a race-conscious admissions policy, despite the Supreme Court’s rulings in the Michigan cases. In upholding the use of affirmative action in admissions, the court effectively negated a 1996 federal-court decision barring such policies in Texas and two other states. Mr. Gates, however, said he wanted the College Station campus to continue to make admissions decisions based solely on merit.
In an analysis of the university’s admissions data this month, the Houston Chronicle concluded that in each of the past few years, legacy status had been the deciding factor in the admissions of more than 300 white freshmen—an amount roughly equal to the total number of black applicants admitted. Only a handful of black applicants were receiving legacy points each year, mainly because the university had not accepted any black students until 1963.
Texas A&M’s legacy policy gave the children, grandchildren, and siblings of alumni 4 extra points on the 100-point scale that is used to weigh applicants for undergraduate admission. Given that enrollment is just 9 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, and 3 percent Asian, several minority lawmakers and civil-rights groups were outraged that the university had retained a non-merit-based standard that seemed to discriminate against minority applicants. Among those who attended news conferences held to denounce the policy were representatives of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Urban League.
State Rep. Garnet F. Coleman, a Democrat who is chairman of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, said it was hypocritical for the university to espouse the values of an objective admissions process while “awarding admissions points to a student just because of bloodline.”
State Rep. Lon Burnam, a Democrat from Fort Worth, said he would propose a law prohibiting the legacy policy, which he called “an untenable concept.”
In announcing that Texas A&M would no longer consider legacy status, Mr. Gates said he had made “a difficult decision, but one that had to be made to maintain consistency in an admissions policy based on individual merit and the whole person.”
Students who are related to alumni, he acknowledged, “add value to what makes those institutions unique.” But, he said, that value would not be lost, because Texas A&M’s culture, and the attachment that people feel for it, “are not the result of 4 out of 100 points on an admissions evaluation.”
Caught in a Crossfire
At one of the news conferences held by critics of Texas A&M’s legacy policy, State Rep. Paul Moreno, a Democrat from El Paso, called it “nothing more than conservative affirmative action.”
Similar charges are often leveled as legacy policies have come into focus in the context of the nation’s broader affirmative-action debate. Defenders of affirmative action often accuse its critics of being hypocrites because of their putative indifference to legacy policies that give many wealthy white children an advantage unrelated to academic merit.
In truth, however, the advocacy groups that have been the most active in opposing affirmative action in college admissions also have been critical of legacy policies.
Officials of the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights, which helped represent the rejected white applicants who sued the University of Michigan, have questioned whether legacy admissions have any place at public colleges, even if such policies don’t run afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection clause. The Center for Equal Opportunity, based in Sterling, Va., has been even more critical.
And Ward Connerly, who played a key role in organizing the ballot campaigns that succeeded in banning race-conscious admissions policies in California and Washington State, considered including language that would prohibit legacy admissions as part of a proposed ban on racial preferences that he is seeking to put before Michigan voters in November 2004. His decision to omit the legacy language was based mainly on a desire to avoid confusing voters.
“For those who believe in merit-based admissions, legacy preferences don’t fit wisely anywhere,” says Edward J. Blum, director of legal affairs for the American Civil Rights Institute, a Sacramento, Calif.-based group that Mr. Connerly founded.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Senator Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has spoken out against legacy admissions and has proposed a bill requiring colleges to report their legacy enrollments as a condition of receiving certain federal grants.
His spokesman, James P. Manley, says Mr. Kennedy is concerned that legacy admissions policies “overwhelmingly favor wealthy and well-connected students at the expense of minorities and less affluent students.”
Aides to Senator Edwards, of North Carolina, say that as president he would seek to bring about the end of legacies by supporting Senator Kennedy’s bill and by using the bully pulpit to discourage colleges from favoring alumni. At a campaign stop this month, Mr. Edwards said, “The legacy preference rewards students who had the most advantages to begin with. That’s an old barrier of the past, and it needs to be knocked down for good.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 50, Issue 21, Page A1
