May 17th 1954. Brown vs Board of education
Loving vs Virginia - 1967
Again, VLP - being of a certain race is a protected class, and those cases have to do with GOVERNMENT actions, not private ones. Being a non-legacy isn’t a protected class, and these universities as private institutions still have a lot of discretion in whom they let in.
Would it be better, IYO, if the fed govt were to mandate that admissions to elite colleges be done by lining up all the SAT’s and taking the 1600’s, the 1590’s, etc. til each class is full?
127
“There may be a case, at least at the state level, for questioning legacy preferences at public state universities, particularly if the state universities are supposed to offer opportunities for all (including those from disadvantaged backgrounds) as opposed to perpetuating the existing diploma elite to the next generation. However, it does seem that there is little such outrage in many states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin, Maryland, and North Carolina, where “relation with alumnus” is a factor in frosh admission to the state flagship.”
UCB – in the case of UVA and UNC, they limit the legacy program only to out-of-state applicants. All in-state applicants get the in-state break (legacy or not) – slightly easier admissions criteria than OOS and (if enrolled) lower in-state tuition.
That keeps in-state parents from getting outraged. Since the OOS legacies are just jumping in front of non-legacy OOS applicants for the available OOS seats (which carry the higher price tag).
The culture and mission of UVA and UNC have long been to have a good number of OOS seats which go to kids who are more qualified on average than the in-staters, so legacy admissions seem to fit in there. UCB and UCLA traditionally have had a different model and mission, so it makes sense that they don’t do legacies.
I am just saying that irrespective of how you feel about legacy admissions, the colleges can do more to release relevant data on this and other metrics on admissions, because without it both sides are engaged in speculation here. People are arguing that such release is either unnecessary or unhelpful. I don’ think so. Some of the posts are just noise, because they are mostly directed at attacking my agenda, my knowledge or my real motives.
My only real agenda is to shift more power from the super elite colleges to the students by forcing them to release more data. I can’t see why any parent or student would have issues with this? Why is everybody carrying water for these multi-billion endowed institutions instead of advocating for the little guy?
Does anybody really think that the super selective colleges have “too little power” right now? Forcing them to release more data will level the playing field a little bit. Why does it matter, what I want to do with the data? The data is the data.
Why does asking for this data make me a whiner or a narcissist or solicit totally unwarranted remarks about my kids.
As the OP, its fascinating and maybe a bit strange how this thread has morphed. I started it simply to express some wistful realism about the college admission process and dealing with hopes that one’s child might be able to share a common life experience with Dad. Such is the curse of success; getting some results in wanting more, or at least keeping one’s place. So my kids have to be better, or play the game better, than I was to get what I got. That’s what I learned, but I also decided not to change anything I’m doing, just recalibrating my expectations. They will find their way based on their own talent and motivation, and I am grateful to be able to support them emotionally and financially.
re post #166-
As a Legacy parent who has been here at CC for over a decade, what it shows is how little you know …
what you want is understandable, but is not realistic.
that is what we are trying to tell you…
"Does anybody really think that the super selective colleges have “too little power” right now? "
I wouldn’t say “too little” power, but they really only have the amount of power that you give them. You have decided to treat them as The Granter of All One’s Wishes And The Key to My Child’s Lifelong Success and Happiness, but that’s just what you’ve built them up in your own head to be. It may stun you that 95% of college bound students give not one moment’s worth of thought to super selective schools, and their lives go on just fine, and they don’t all wind up flipping burgers either.
They have exactly the amount of power they should have – they get to determine who they want to admit and the kind of community that they wish to form. It must suck not to be able to strong-arm one’s own kid in, but that’s how life goes. They don’t owe you anything, they don’t owe me anything. Any more than you are “owed” a date from the cute girl at the bar whom you have your eye on.
So you have found that the school your kid really likes gives legacies a boost. Let’s say for the sake of argument the overall rate is 10% and the legacy rate is 30%. Now what? Would you not have your kid apply based on that? What can you possibly do with that information?
Neither of my kids were athletes. I didn’t waste my time worrying about what kind of bump athletes got at their schools. Neither of my kids were development candidates (bummer!). I didn’t waste my time worrying about what kind of bump development candidates get. Neither of my kids were from North Dakota, or had Hispanic heritage, or were president of student council, or played the flute. So I didn’t waste my time worrying about the bumps given to North Dakotas or Hispanics or student council presidents or flutists.
Normal people approach the process by being the best they that they can be, not by trying to figure out the exact combination that (quote unquote) “guarantees” admission and then trying to become that.
Maybe the poster who wants so much to have this “conversation,” which has gone off track into endless rnse and repeat, needs to start a new thread. We all have opinions but it’s getting to be soapbox-y.
Haven’t followed this long thread very carefully, so I don’t know if this was raised somewhere I missed, but considering that legacy admits have higher test scores, eg. as reported in the Harvard freshman survey that Harvard legacies score 59 points higher on the SAT than non-legacy freshmen http://features.thecrimson.com/2014/freshman-survey/admissions/, it’s a little hard for me to believe that they are receiving a huge admissions preference. The logic of some posters on this site would say that this proves that Harvard discriminates against its own legacies.
Do you want to pat my head also now? 
Again off topic, if you want to start a new topic specifically at this issue, I will be happy to provide my personal opinion on this one
I don’t want any mandates. I want MORE DATA. You may not want it. I do. I want lots and lots of data. I want to slice and dice it and view it 500 different ways. There i admit it. That’s my fetish. I want the govt to mandate universities to release more data, because these universities will not do it willingly. This is in the public interest. Higher education is too important to let a few universities with a lot of money to just run a black box admission process and then give us canned answers to important questions. I want a “student bill of rights”. There I have said it. If that makes me and my kids entitled, pompous, or nincompoops, so be it.
Some years ago, somebody posted a link to a law review article that made an article that legacy preferences could be challenged in a lawsuit. At the time, I said that I thought that such lawsuits were doomed to failure, especially if directed toward private colleges. I thought then, and think now, that there might be a tiny chance that such a suit might have some bite with respect to a public college, but even then it would be extremely difficult to show that legacy preference discriminated against a protected class. The government is not going to step in, for several reasons. First, not enough people care about the legacy preference issue at elite private universities. Second, just as many people would object to government interference with the admissions practices of private universities–and the universities would be able to hire very good lawyers to defend their practices. Also, I would just mention that the Supreme Court is stocked with people who have Ivy League educations (at least for law school). So good luck.
Just because a fight is hard, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight it
So go fight it. We disagree with you that it’s so critical.
Given that there are thousands of colleges and universities in the US, I don’t see how the legacy policies of a few private universities are of great PUBLIC interest.
OK. Time to have another conversation 
Live Long and Prosper
“Higher education is too important to let a few universities with a lot of money to just run a black box admission process and then give us canned answers to important questions.”
You’re waaaay overvaluing the importance of these schools.
Your other problem is that even if you had this database, just because in aggregate kids with X, Y and Z characteristics got in at a x% acceptance rate – does NOT mean that they are obligated, the next year, to admit kids with X, Y and Z characteristics at that same acceptance rate. For one thing, the actual proportion of kids with those characteristics in the applicant pool can change from year to year.
As a trite example, there was likely a point where kids who did volunteer work overseas (digging ditches in Honduras) got in at relatively high rates. As everyone flocked to that extracurricular and they began to make up a larger portion of the applicant pool, they became less appealing and the acceptance rate of such kids plummeted - because they weren’t interesting and original any more. How unsophisticated it would be to assume that because last year, 40% of Honduras ditch-diggers got in, that next year 40% of Honduras ditch-diggers will get in! Yet that’s exactly what you would do with your analysis. You would assume that the rates would or should stay similar – even though Honduras ditch-diggers went from 5% of the applicant pool to 25% of the applicant pool.
Why, exactly, are people so hepped up about these colleges? You can get equivalent faculty strength and, for all practical purposes, equivalent educational facilities at Berkeley or Michigan, both of which have pretty transparent admissions. They have better financial aid for middle class students than Berkeley or Michigan, but that’s in the context of their current practices w/re legacy admission. If they stopped admitting so many legacies, there’s a good chance their revenue would go down – both in terms of donations and in terms of full-pay students – so there’s no guarantee they would continue their current financial aid practices. You can go to Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, or any IITs and get affordable higher education at world-class universities with admissions policies that are essentially purely meritocratic. So why care about Harvard?
Could it be, at least in part, because Harvard’s holistic, black-box admissions policy has actually created a stronger, more interesting institution, largely free of state control? Because Harvard and its peers have created a model that generates unbelievable levels of private funding and a really rich social environment because of the balance they strike between pure meritocracy and institutional identification? Because the quality of the overall experience there (including extracurricular activities and social networking) is superior to what one would get at a purely meritocratic institution?
Without the legacy preferences and other aspects of holistic admission people regularly complain about here, they wouldn’t be the same institutions.
“it’s a little hard for me to believe that they are receiving a huge admissions preference. The logic of some posters on this site would say that this proves that Harvard discriminates against its own legacies.”
The studies say that your assumption is a common misperception. The Hurwitz study cited above, in particular does control for factors like SAT scores. After controlling for variables like wealth, gender, race and athlete status, the study concludes that (all things equal) a legacy kid with an SAT of X has a significantly better chance of getting in than a non-legacy kid with an SAT of X. The legacy kids are not dummies (as in the olden days). They are quite smart, but they get in much more frequently than similarly smart non-legacy kids. The difference is quite significant statistically. Whether you consider that “big” or not depends on how you want to view it.
Legacies could easily have higher scores on average. Because other groups can get in with lower scores – like athletes, like URMs, like development cases. That pulls down the average scores.
That misperception is, understandably, fostered by the colleges. They want to tell the non-legacy public that the legacy boost is no big deal – just a feather on the scale. And they want to tell the legacy constituency that the legacy boost is meaningful – so as to keep those donations, applications and tuition dollars flowing.
I haven’t read the entire Hurwitz study but I am wondering about by the finding that “secondary legacies”–apparently defined as a parent who attended graduate school, or a sibling, grandparent, aunt, or uncle who attended as a graduate or undergraduate- get a 13.7% admissions advantage when all these controls are applied. Many schools say they do not consider graduate degrees for legacy, and I don’t think any of the schools my daughter applied to asked about this list of relatives. My daughter had a secondary legacy at a school she applied to and there was no place to report that on the application so they never knew. But she got a 13.7% admissions boost out of it? Call me skeptical.