“Yale’s a long shot if you don’t have any connections,” my friend says to me. I could tell from her tone that she was astonished that I would even consider applying to the school without my parents having gone there. As she puts it, “you either have to be a legacy or a genius to get in.”
I’d heard these words before, from nearly everyone who knows about my Ivy League aspirations–relatives, peers, counselors–and as much as I hate to admit it, they are right; legacy applicants–or applicants who have a parent or relative who attended said university-have an increase of 23.3 more percentage points when it comes to acceptance. And if the applicant’s parent went to the school, the student has an increase of 45.1 percentage points.
So what’s the big deal? What’s so wrong with giving kids preferential treatment to go to the same schools as their parents? It’s all about preserving tradition, right?
Not exactly. For starters, legacy programs benefit rich white people, as if that demographic needs more of a boost in life.
This comes as no surprise, of course, seeing as, historically, white people (and, more specifically, white men) were the only ones allowed to go to elite schools like the Ivies, and only rich white people could afford it. So their rich white ancestors are still benefitting from archaic policies.
Ironically, it was Princeton professors Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung who conducted a study to see how certain factors– one of which being legacy status–affect college admittance. They found that, while white students make up fewer than half of the total applicant pool, they account for 75.6% of all legacies. This means that white students are more likely to get into Ivy League universities than applicants of color with the same qualifications. So, for those of us whose families immigrated here, like mine did, or who historically didn’t have the racial or financial privilege to attend an elite school, our dreams of attending an elite institution will come true when Hell freezes over.
Aside from the fact that giving preference to legacy applicants is systemically racist, legacies don’t have to work as hard as their non-legacy peers. At Yale, my dream school, a legacy applicant has a 20-25% chance of admittance, while my chances hover more around 6%. A paper by Nathan Martin and Kenneth Spencer found that “legacy applicants receive the equivalent of a 160 point boost” on the SAT. The study also says that “the average SAT score for legacies is about 40 points lower than students with advanced degree parents, and about 12 points lower than students with college degree parents.” So legacies are lower performing, but yet are accepted at higher rates.
This is the affirmative action that is really affecting admissions.
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