Four Cheers for Amherst
Say Adieu to the Genetic Lottery
Barely fifteen years after the Communist takeover of China, Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution because, so I was taught in college, Mao was enraged to discover that, even under communism, 80 percent of the students at the elite Peking University were the children of graduates.
The Cultural Revolution was a political failure and a humanitarian outrage. But Mao’s instinct was correct. Education is the cornerstone of opportunity. More than ever, it’s the ticket to success, and handing out tickets on the basis of birth is a disgrace.
Except in the United States, where seventy of the most elite private colleges, including all of the Ivies, give preference in admissions to the offspring of graduates.
Last week, tiny Amherst College shattered the mahogany consensus and ended legacy admissions.
Instant reaction had it that legacy admissions will endure—the practice is too entrenched, too beloved by alumni, too fundamental to fundraising.
Don’t believe it. Legacies are going. Schools that tarry now are only upping their eventual embarrassment when they recant—which they should and will.
In his trenchant new book, What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald J. Daniels points out that legacy admissions are an “almost exclusively American custom.” What a bizarre black mark for a country that overthrew the British crown, and its system of entitled peerages, on the premise of all men (sic) created equal.
There are legitimate intellectual debates to be had about many university admissions policies—including how much weight to give to diversity, or to athletic skill, or to academic merit.
There is no debate over inherited privilege. It stinks.
It undermines the premise of education and of American democracy itself—that, in Lincoln’s words, the United States government exists “to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
With Lincoln, it wasn’t just talk. In the midst of the Civil War he signed the Morrill Act, creating land-grant colleges (subsidized by grants of federal land). The specific goal was to enable middle-class Americans to attend college.
To this day, Morrill Act schools from Michigan State to Mississippi State are engines of upward mobility, whereas the Ivies perpetuate an academic nobility. A Harvard Crimson survey of the 2021 class found that 29 percent had a close relative who attended Harvard.
Harvard will never be as representative, socio-economically, as Mississippi State. That’s the downside of merit. But legacy admissions turn merit on its head. To paraphrase Warren Buffett, the practice rewards the winners of a genetic lottery. If we are to have elite schools at all, let them nurture elite achievement and talent, not high-bred chromosomes.
The once obvious point that legacy admissions squeeze out students of color, religious minorities and the poor is no longer quite true. The 2022 class at Harvard is roughly half nonwhite, according to a Crimson survey, and 17 percent were the first generation in their families to attend college. Such trends, which are widespread, reflect a considerable effort to diversify.
Yet elite schools are undiversified in other ways. At Harvard, according to the Crimson, a plurality of students were raised on the East and West coasts; rural Americans, approximately a fifth of the population, comprise only 10% .
What is certain is that legacy admissions discriminate against people of any color whose parents did not attend Harvard. Legacy applicants are five times as likely to be accepted as others. This is a novel sort of color line; crimson at Harvard, white and blue at Yale, black and orange at Princeton. Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at Century Foundation, aptly deems such schools a “multiracial aristocracy.”
Multiracial “club” also fits. The justifications for a legacy program—that it builds institutional loyalty, and encourages gift-giving—bear the hallmarks of an earlier age when leading universities were run as private institutions. Today their spirit must be public.
Given the outsized endowments of elite schools (Harvard’s is $53 billion; Princeton has more than $26 billion), the assertion that schools “need” to, in effect, auction off places to donor-alums is hard to swallow. In fact, at Johns Hopkins, which dropped legacy preferences in 2014, “alumni participation” has steadily grown.[1] Massachusetts Institute of Technology never favored legacies; it does not seem to have suffered (endowment: $27 billion).
In the long term, the elite financial model is likely to face pressure. College in Canada, England and elsewhere costs a fraction of private college here. The model of super-high tuition and full-on fundraising channeled into ever-more lavish dorms and other amenities, not to mention mushrooming administrative silos, treats students as luxury consumers, requiring heavy doses of financial aid for the non-rich. A more cost-conscious model may be inevitable.
Colleges will fight to preserve their system, but it shouldn’t be at the price of American notions of fairness. As Daniels writes, legacy preferences bestow a significant edge to children who already enjoy the “considerable advantages” of well-off educated parents, the best K-12 schools, ample extracurricular opportunities and private tutoring. With legacy preferences they are “doubly advantaged.” What is American about that?
Book News
My new book, Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, will be published by Penguin Press in March 2022. More about that in subsequent issues.
But why wait? You can preorder Ways and Means here:
[1] What Universities Owe Democracy, 83-84.
Terrific and timely piece!