Harvard’s admission is contested for favoring alumni’s children
It’s called Affirmative Action for the Rich: Harvard’s special admissions treatment for students whose parents are alumni or whose relatives have donated money. And in a complaint filed Monday, a group of legal activists demanded the federal government put an end to it, arguing that fairness was even more important after the Supreme Court last week severely limited race-conscious confessions.
Three groups from the Boston area asked the education department to review the practice, saying the university’s admissions policies discriminated against black, Hispanic and Asian applicants in favor of less qualified white applicants with alumni and donor connections.
“Why do we reward children for privileges and benefits built up by previous generations?” asked Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, who is handling the case. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit and should not affect the college admissions process.”
The complaint from liberal groups comes days after a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, won its Supreme Court case. And it increases pressure on Harvard and other selective colleges to eliminate special preferences for the children of alumni and donors.
The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which would review the complaint, may already be preparing for an investigation. In a statement following the Supreme Court decision, President Biden said he would ask the department to investigate “practices such as legacy recordings and other systems that expand privilege rather than opportunity.”
A spokeswoman for Harvard, Nicole Rura, said the school would not comment on the complaint, but reiterated a statement made last week: “As we said, in the coming weeks and months, the university will determine how we can maintain our core values. , consistent with the court’s new precedent.”
Colleges claim the practice helps build community and encourages donations, which can be used for financial aid.
A poll released last year by the Pew Research Center found that an increasing portion of the public—75 percent—believed that legacy preferences shouldn’t be a factor in who gets accepted into college.
And the call to eliminate inheritance and donor preferences has recently grown across the political spectrum.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, tweeted that if the Supreme Court “took their ludicrous ‘color blindness’ claims seriously, they would have abolished legacy recordings, also known as affirmative action for the privileged.”
Of “The Faulkner Focus,” a Fox News program, Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican and presidential candidate, said, “One of the things Harvard could do to make that even better is to eliminate old programs where they preferential treatment for legacy children.”
Peter Arcidiacono, an economist from Duke University who has analyzed Harvard data, found it that a typical white legacy applicant’s chances of being admitted are quintupled over a typical, white non-legacy applicant.
Still, eliminating legacy affiliations at Harvard, the study said, would not compensate for the loss of diversity if race-conscious admissions were also eliminated.
In deciding on race-conscious confessions, some Supreme Court justices criticized old confessions. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in an opinion that agreed with the majority of the court, took aim at preferences for the children of donors and alumni, saying, “They are no help to applicants who cannot boast of their parents’ happiness or trips to tent the alumni throughout their lives. While they are also racially neutral on their faces, these preferences undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.
In her dissenting opinion, Judge Sonia Sotomayor referred to old confessions, arguing that continuing race-based preferences was only reasonable in light of the fact that most of the pieces in the confession puzzle “disgrace underrepresented racial minorities.”
While Colorado passed a law in 2021 banning legacy admissions at public universities, the legislation in Congress and several other states has gained little traction.
A bill introduced last year in New York was opposed by the state association for private schools, the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, which includes highly selective colleges like Columbia, Cornell and Colgate.
In Connecticut, where lawmakers held a hearing on the issue last year, Yale was one of several private schools to resist. In written testimonyJeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of student admissions, called the proposed ban a government interference in university affairs.
Selective private universities in particular have been slow to weed out legacies, with MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and Amherst College among the few elite schools that don’t take advantage of them.
In a press release last month detailing the school’s fall class, the first since the college abolished legacy affiliations, Amherst announced that the number of first-generation students in the school’s fall class would be higher than ever — 19 percent — while the number of students who were bequests had fallen to 6 percent. Previously, legacies made up 11 percent of the class.
The complaint to the education department was filed by three groups: Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England, and Greater Boston Latino Network.