Many markers on college applications tend to favor students who grew up in wealthy homes. SAT scores are higher for students who could afford SAT tutors. Extracurriculars are more impressive for students who didn’t have to work after school. The list goes on — full of nuanced problems and hidden biases, ones that aren’t at all easy to address. But there’s a another question on applications prejudiced toward wealth and privilege, one that can’t be masked: the consideration of a student’s legacy status.
This weekend, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley, denounced the policy of elite schools to favor students related to alumni. Speaking at a financial literacy and economic education conference in New York, Dudley called the practice “essentially a ‘donate to admit’ policy.”
Colleges often acknowledge taking a student’s legacy status under consideration in the admissions process, but they are much less inclined to publicize what percent of their students are legacies, or how heavily that factor weighed on their admissions decisions.
Many alumni donate money to their alma mater. Often, these alumni have children, many of whom apply to the schools their parents went to. When their children’s applications aren’t accepted, the implication tends to be that these donations will be pulled. This just further incentivizes schools to show a little more lenience towards legacy students.
But college admissions is a zero sum game. Every spot that a legacy student takes, another student loses. In the increasingly competitive world of admissions, what the top of parents diploma says should in no way be a factor.
One of the worst offenders is our neighbors across the river — Harvard University. In The Harvard Crimson’s survey of the Class of 2021, 30 percent of students reported having some family relation to the school. Considering Harvard only graduates a few thousand students a year, and their applicant pool comes from all across the world, it’s easy to see this statistic is grossly inflated.
Students whose parents graduated from elite schools are naturally more likely to be well-off than those who went to less prestigious schools, or maybe even didn’t go to school at all. Giving a further advantage to affluent students in the admissions process is perpetuating a cycle wherein competitive colleges are disproportionately dominated by the upper class.
Elite academic institutions tout their diversification policies and parade their inclusivity, but then employ legacy policies that actively work against that. Favoring legacy students only advantages the advantaged. Meanwhile, poor students continue to get left behind. A report published by Georgetown earlier this year studied 346 top colleges, finding that in total, less than 20 percent of students qualified for a Pell grant, given by the government to help low-income students pay for college.
And actually, preferential treatment toward legacies doesn’t really benefit legacy students either. It puts undue pressure on students to apply to their parents alma matters, and follow in their family’s footsteps. If they are rejected, they face disappointment and shame, but even if they get in, they face doubts of whether they did so on their own merit. When there are different expectations for students with legacy status, the mentality this can create is nothing short of toxic.
Taking legacy status into consideration is tempting for any university. Why wouldn’t it be? Schools want to keep their alumni happy, and they certainly want to maximize their potential for donations. But that’s not the only option. A few top-tier schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, don’t look at alumni relations whatsoever. They judge students on the content of their application alone.
BU is not Harvard. Our campus does not have a reputation for being littered with legacies by any means. However, our application does ask if prospective students have any alumni relations. And the truth is, we don’t know how heavily this factor is weighed. When a student gets into BU, it should be because they got in. Whatever their parents or grandparents or second-cousin-once-removed did should not even be on the application.
