How to use legacy admissions to promote campus diversity

During the recent debate preceding the Supreme Court’s decision to end the practice of affirmative action in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson highlighted how her colleagues had no issue with a prospective student gaining admittance to an elite college because they would be a fifth-generation legacy, but at the same time were willing to make admissions more difficult for BIPOC applicants for whom being a fifth-generation legacy is an impossibility, because their ancestors were denied access to these institutions due to systematic, race-based discrimination. Multigenerational legacy status is unavailable to the bulk of aspiring BIPOC students, for reasons as innocuous as patterns of immigration to those as insidious as this country’s history of enslavement, genocide, and dehumanization.

With universities now being compelled by the law to be fully race-blind in their admissions practices, organizers want to compel them to drop the common practice of considering applicants’ legacy status. These groups argue that by giving special consideration to the children of alumni, elite colleges and universities engage in a form of pro-White affirmative action. Although this complaint aligns with the general stereotype of these universities being bastions of whiteness, elitism, undeserved wealth, and prestige, it is worth taking a more nuanced look at how best to preserve the gains afforded by past race-conscious admissions and promote diversity on campuses.

Although it seems like institutions like Harvard remain predominantly white, the past 60 years of battling for affirmative action policies (or the past 120 years of Americans struggling for educational access and attainment for members of historically oppressed cultural groups) were not fought in vain. For these institutions, recent graduating cohorts indeed have been more diverse compared to ones in the distant past, across ethnocultural as well as socioeconomic and gender lines. Harvard reports that its admitted Class of 2026 comprised 15.2% African-American students, 27.9% Asian-American, and 12.6% Hispanic or Latino. Harvard also boasts that 15% of their undergraduate students are first-generation, the first students in their immediate family to attend four-year college. These are gains that we would not want to lose as universities reshape their admissions policies in light of the recent court ruling.

One way to cement these gains is to consider legacy status of the children of younger, more recent alumni while simultaneously discounting the legacy status of older, more distant alumni. Or put differently, universities could phase out legacy considerations, applying them for applicants who have a parent alumnus (e.g., a mother) but ignoring them for applicants who are related to alumni spanning multiple generations (e.g., a mother, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather).

Or consider another possibility. For first-generation students and their families, attending elite universities can be transformational. Yes, attending college can be costly, but it can also provide access to opportunities that can be bend the arc of familial histories from continued marginalization and exploitation toward fulfilling work and economic justice. Taking legacy status into consideration for the children of first-generation alumni (2nd generation college applicants) could be another way to continue to preserve and promote campus diversity without relying on applicant race as a factor in admissions.

Policies such as these are appropriate since the harms caused by previous exclusionary admissions practices during the history of American colleges and universities were felt across multiple generations and the social mobility gains from higher education typically take multiple generations to take hold. Too often both proponents and critics of affirmative action tout isolated anecdotal BIPOC success stories as evidence that policies either are working or are not needed. But anecdotes are no substitute for data and systemic problems require systemic solutions.

Although the idea of eliminating legacy admissions practices feels morally right, it might be overly reactive. Doing so might inadvertently reduce the value recent BIPOC, marginalized, or disadvantaged alumni receive from their degrees. The answer to the court’s ruling on affirmative action, a ruling that threatens institutions ability to pursue diversity, is not to further handcuff them. Instead, organizations committed to diversifying these bastions of white power should work shoulder-to-shoulder with colleges and universities to develop creative and legal admissions policies to the benefit of society-at-large.

There are at least two key advantages of preserving legacy admissions and retooling them to prioritize admitting children of recent or first-generation alumni. First, these proposals reflect a consideration of the role higher education plays in cementing patterns of wealth inequality, and the role it can play in reversing said trends. In this way, these proposals are philosophically aligned with both left- and right-leaning populist positions. For the student whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents attended august institutions, have they not already received enough of a “leg up” in the meritocratic race? Meritocracies do not reset with each generation; benefits accrue over time and across generations. These proposals respect this reality, by allowing multigenerational benefits for those who historically are less well-off but curtailing the practice for those who have already benefitted from preferential treatment over time.

Second, these proposals obviate the need for BIPOC or disadvantaged students to subject themselves to a trauma beauty pageant when applying to college. Although well-intentioned, recent calls to replace affirmative action with policies that in essence reward childhood traumatic experience with increased chances at college admittance are grotesque. This idea was proffered as an olive branch by the chief justice in the SC majority opinion (colleges and universities can consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise” ) and echoed by the president in his speech deriding the majority opinion (“what I propose…is a new standard where colleges take into account the adversity a student has overcome”). One problem with these suggestions (among many) is that they take a broad, structural problem created by an unjust society and recast it something that individuals victimized by society must work to fix. As a person who has sat on recruiting and admissions committees within universities, and someone who has conducted countless alumni interviews for my alma mater, I predict that it would be a nightmare to build a preference ordering for admissions based on the degree to which an applicant experienced trauma. From the applicant side, it is an unfair expectation that students who have experienced adversity must disclose it at the risk of being passed over during the admission process. Such a policy reduces to a view that BIPOC students or those who have experienced adversity have less of a right to privacy than other applicants.

I am no university admissions specialist, but I am not a dispassionate observer either. I am a Black, first-generation Harvard College graduate who is a father to two Black children. All of these aspects of my identity likely bias my perspective. Nevertheless, these policy suggestions offered here are not rooted purely in selfishness or my mama bear instincts. For far too long legacy admissions have been used to solidify power, entrench wealth, and keep private colleges the exclusive domain of the privileged. With a bit of creative thinking, these same policies can be used to enhance diversity and transform the families of the historically underprivileged.