Education / Schools

Can We Now Address Legacy Admissions? Or Will We Keep Focusing On Affirmative Action In A Silo?

Inequality begets inequality. And we are only becoming more unequal.

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“I used to be an honor-roll student, damn / Then I turned to a beast the first time I seen someone get some blood on his sneaks / He had on Air Max 93s, but was slumped in the street / His mama crying, that did something to me, oh Lord / The sh*t I’m doing for my hood I won’t get an award.” — Meek Mill

The same people who criticize affirmative action often have no such comment for legacy admissions. It is all too convenient to forget how college admissions really work. It is harder to accept the realities of our current education system.

At the very least, Students for Fair Admission addressed legacy policies of Harvard in its suit against the University. And others, like The View hosts Ana Navarro and Sunny Hostin, have even expressed their frustration “with the people named in the [last week’s criminal complaint] filing, particularly the rich, white parents who allegedly gamed the system for their mediocre kids despite the system already being disproportionately in their favor.”

The question comes to many minds: Why the hell didn’t these rich parents just give the money to the proper university departments to get their kids into “the right” colleges? Even among the elite, there’s a spectrum. Some have millions to buy a building, while others can only bribe coaches and university-admissions officials with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Poor schmucks.

On an uneven playing field, privilege remains the most effective game plan. Are we grown up enough to admit this? Or are you still under the illusion America is a true meritocracy? Inequality begets inequality. And we are only becoming more unequal.

As I have previously noted: “The score on your SATs or other exams is a better predictor of your parents’ income and the car they drive than of your performance in college.”

National College Access Network’s Executive Director Kim Cook states “[y]our ZIP code can really determine what your future will look like.” The majority of our country’s public students are now in poverty. The Economist warns that privilege in the U.S. has become increasingly heritable:

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[America’s] education system favors the well-off more than anywhere else in the rich world. Thanks to hyper-local funding, America is one of only three advanced countries where the government spends more on schools in rich areas than in poor ones. Its university fees have risen 17 times as fast as median incomes since 1980, partly to pay for pointless bureaucracy and flashy buildings. And many universities offer ‘legacy’ preferences, favoring the children of alumni in admissions.

A regular applicant to Harvard has an 11% chance of being accepted, but a legacy has a 40% acceptance rate.

Daniel Golden says “the legacy preference was formalized early last century, in some cases partly to limit enrollment of Jews. Today, the practice often has that effect on other groups. At the University of Virginia: 91% of legacy applicants accepted on an early-decision basis for next fall are white; 1.6% are black, 0.5% are Hispanic, and 1.6% are Asian. Among applicants with no alumni parents, the pool of those accepted is more diverse: 73% white, 5.6% black, 3.5% Hispanic, and 9.3% Asian.”

Not everyone is privileged, but at UVA, 91% of legacies sure have it good.

While affirmative action policies are argued and contested in courtrooms and on the front page of newspapers, we allow policies that promote the exact opposite to be rationalized and agreed upon in hallowed halls and behind closed doors.

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Dean Kevin R. Johnson asks, “In these times, can a truly excellent law school have a homogenous student body and faculty? Can we truly — and do we want to — imagine a top-25 law school comprised of predominantly white men?”

Black enrollment is 6.9% at Yale, 5.5% at University of Chicago, and 3.6% at University of Michigan.

At none of the nation’s 15 highest-ranked law schools do black enrollments reach 9%. As I have previously mentioned, diversity has improved in legal education. Unfortunately, it has been almost exclusively at less prestigious law schools. The fact is our top law schools do have a homogenous student body and faculty. With that being said, are these schools truly excellent?

I don’t write these type of articles in a vacuum. And you shouldn’t view them in a silo either:

  1. What Could Disrupt Diversity in Law? The Economy, Stupid. (December 2014)
  2. ‘Affirmative Action’ In Law: The Four-Letter Phrase (January 2015)
  3. Minorities In The Legal Profession Have Increased By Less Than One Percent Since 2000 (December 2015)
  4. Opponents Of Affirmative Action Will Get Another Bite At The Apple Next SCOTUS Term (July 2015)
  5. Affirmative Action Is Here To Stay (For Now); How Will This Benefit The Legal Profession? (July 2016)
  6. Asian Americans Are Being Used As A Wedge To Advance The Anti-Affirmative Action Agenda (August 2017)
  7. As Asian Americans Become More Pivotal In The Affirmative Action Debate, Both Sides Weigh In (August 2017)

In an era of fake news, context is king. If you want to remain so quick to criticize affirmative action, then you should take the time to understand our entire education system, our society. As Ray Dalio often states: “Embrace reality and deal with it.” We need to work with reality as it is and not how it should be. In other words, we should be hyper-realists.

I, for one, am happy that the media is covering this college admissions scheme. In accordance with Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” This latest higher-education headline provides the perfect opportunity to address the cronyism and nepotism that has impregnated our education system.

Why should we attempt to tackle all other aspects of college admissions, yet leave the nebulous legacy policies of yesteryear and those with such behind-the-scenes influence to their own devices?

The only difference between those who are facing criminal charges and other parents of legacy admits, is that the indicted bribed the bouncers and staff instead of lining up their 17- and 18-year-old progenies in the VIP line at the backdoor.

Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

 

 

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