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<p>LOL. Reminds me of what Chicago’s late Mayor Daley (Richard J. Daley, the father, not Richard M. Daley, the son and current mayor) said when asked about reports of rampant patronage and political favoritism in his fair city: “If I can’t help my friends and family, who CAN I help?”</p>
<p>Look, obviously this is different since these are mostly private schools we’re talking about, not arms of the state. As I said before, they should be free to admit whomever they want. But if their policies have the effect of reinforcing a self-perpetuating elite based on bloodlines, then I would seriously question whether as a matter of public policy it makes sense to continue to give them public subsidies like tax-deductible status, exemptions from local property taxes, and various forms of federal payments. </p>
<p>And I really don’t understand the argument that says legacy policies don’t matter because the legacy admits are all kids who fall within the range of those who get admitted anyway. There are two versions of this argument. On one version, these are the exact same kids who would have been admitted even without a legacy preference; but if that’s the case, then we don’t NEED the legacy preference, so why retain it? </p>
<p>The other version of the argument says a legacy preference doesn’t harm anyone because legacy admits have the same kinds of stats as non-legacy admits. But that, it seems, misses the point. Admissions is ultimately a zero-sum game; to the extent one group’s chances of admission are enhanced by a preference awarded members of that group, everyone else’s chances are diminished. Look, suppose the city of New Haven is hiring firefighters and says it will only hire from among those who score at least 85 on a 100-point test; and then it actually hires only those who scored at least 85 and whose fathers were themselves New Haven firefighters. In that case I think most of us would say the hiring policy is unfair to the non-legacy applicants—including, for example, some newcomers to the city whose fathers never even had the opportunity to apply, or those whose fathers would not have passed the physical, or were barred because of racial exclusions of the time, or whatever. Would that unfairness disappear if New Haven applied that discriminatory legacy hiring policy to fill only half the positions, or a third, or a quarter? At what point does it cease to be discriminatory and become benign, or a matter of indifference to the non-favored groups? And does it really matter that New Haven is a public entity, while Yale is “private”? Is Yale really so “private” when it benefits from all sort of tax breaks and public subsidies?</p>
<p>I’m not saying SAT scores (or New Haven’s hypothetical firefighter test) are objective measures of “merit,” or that “merit” should be the sole criterion for college admissions. I guess I am saying, with Thomas Jefferson, that hereditary privilege is an evil in itself, because it’s antithetical to our democratic ideals of equal opportunity. We can’t enforce those ideals on everyone, nor should we try. But I do think it is fair to question the degree to which the public is effectively subsidizing hereditary privilege by lavishing tax subsidies and direct subsidies on institutions that operate on those principles. Now it could be, as some suggest, that this concern is overblown; but I have yet to see hard data that establish that point. I think the colleges should provide it. Perhaps they should be compelled to provide it under Congressional subpoena, and then we can judge for ourselves how great is the legacy preference, and what effect does it have on opportunities for non-legacy applicants. And if the data ultimately do support the claim that it “just doesn’t matter,” then I’d ask again, “If it REALLY doesn’t matter, then why not end it, and end with it the perception that this is a game rigged in favor of a privileged self-perpetuating class?”</p>