Looking at Legacy Admissions

I have not written much in this space lately. That failure is on me. In the wake of the horrible U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admssions Inc vs Fellows of Harard College; and the endless parsing of their decision, I want to discuss one facet of what are known as legacy admissions.

For those who have not been readers of my rantings, I spent 17 years working at an exclusive, pricy, private school on the Westside of Los Angeles. While I did not work in the Admissions Office, I observed the process from a close perspective due to my role as the administrator of the Financial Aid program. I remember seeing a white board in the Admissions Office where there were 26 blank lines. When that board was filled out each year, at the beginning of the admissions process, the names of the pending legacy admissions were filling a number of the spaces. It was assumed that they would all get one of the highly covveted spaces in the incoming Kindergarten class.

Critics of legacy admissions describe them as "affirmative action for white people." Are they wrong? 36% of Harvard's Class of 2022 are legacy admissions. A 2022 study showed that at Notre Dame, USC, Cornell and Dartmouth, legacy admissions outnumbered Black admissions. Clearly, legacy admissions reduce the diverrsity of the student bodies at universities that engage in such admissions.

Now let's examine the issue of legacy donations. Here are some numbers:

$184.6 billion
$23.07 billion
$49.4 billion?

Those numbers are:

Total endowment of the 8 Ivy League Universities
Average endowment of those 8 universities
Endowment of Harvard



Here's one more number. $4.96 million. That is the salary for the Chief Investment Officer of Yale University. That amount includes a bonus of $2.85 million.

In my humble opinion, legacy admissions at universities are affirmative action for white people.