Legacy Admissions: A Blow to the Meritocracy

The concept of a meritocracy, a utopian system where people achieve success through talent and ability, as opposed to generational wealth, is the foundation of the American dream. The idea that anyone, wealthy or poor, immigrant or local, has an equal chance to make it big is one of the defining pillars of American identity. What holds this pillar up? Education. A college degree, for countless people, is vital for their future careers. Unfortunately, college admissions are notoriously brutal, even unfair, and contain cracks that threaten to bring this pillar down.

A serious threat comes from legacy admissions, which give applicants preferential treatment based on whether their family members attended the same college. Supporters of legacy admissions claim that they help facilitate vital donations from alumni. But according to US News, alumni donations make up only 7.7 percent of college funding nationally, meaning that legacy donations make up an even smaller share. In reality, legacy admissions provide some candidates with an unfair advantage that is unacceptable in a merit-based society.

A study by Harvard economists clearly demonstrated the unfair advantages that legacy admissions provide, showing that legacy applicants have four times as high a chance of acceptance compared to equally or more qualified non-legacy candidates. This means that sometimes, candidates with higher qualifications lose out to their less-deserving legacy counterparts. This is unacceptable - nobody can control the circumstances of their birth, so why should arbitrary factors like legacy in a school hold such influence over their chances of admission?

The prestigious Johns Hopkins University, which is located in Baltimore, Maryland, tested the theory of unfair advantages when it banned legacy admissions. After the ban, the percentage of legacy students in incoming undergraduate classes dropped from 8.5 percent to 1.7 percent, showing that an overwhelming majority of legacy students wouldn’t have been admitted without their privileged status. Simultaneously, the percentage of low-income students in these classes nearly doubled, rising from 16.7 percent to 30.8 percent. This demonstrates that legacy admissions were keeping qualified candidates from underprivileged backgrounds from a place in college. 

Legacy admissions at elite schools are also biased against the children of immigrants and people of color, whose parents are more likely to have attended institutions outside of America or attended less expensive institutions. According to a legal filing against Harvard, 70 percent of legacy applicants are white. This makes historical sense: colleges’ past racial discrimination would lead each generation of legacy applicants to mirror its primarily white predecessors. All of this means that legacy admissions work against people of color, especially immigrants, counteracting the American ideal of equality.

Legacy admissions give some students an unfair advantage, which compromises the American dream for countless aspiring students. My message goes out to every school that has ever overlooked merit in favor of privilege: Remove legacy admissions from your schools and see who truly deserves to be there.