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SanFrancisco版 - 转载一个:10 Myths About Legacy Preferences in College Admissions
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话题: legacy话题: alumni话题: percent
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发帖数: 905
1
10 Myths About Legacy Preferences in College Admissions
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Legacy preferences, which provide a leg up in college admissions to
applicants who are the offspring of alumni, are employed at almost three-
quarters of selective research universities and virtually all elite liberal-
arts colleges. Yet legacy preferences have received relatively little public
attention, especially when compared with race-based affirmative-action
programs, which have given rise to hundreds of books and law-review articles
, numerous court decisions, and several state initiatives to ban the
practice.
The secrecy surrounding legacy preferences has perpetuated a number of myths
, including the following:
1. Legacy preferences are just a "tie breaker" in close calls.
While some colleges and universities try to play down the impact of legacy
preferences, calling them "tie breakers," research from Princeton's Thomas
Espenshade suggests that their weight is significant, on the order of adding
160 SAT points to a candidate's record (on a scale of 400-1600). Likewise,
William Bowen, of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and colleagues found that
, within a given SAT-score range, being a legacy increased one's chances of
admission to a selective institution by 19.7 percentage points. That is to
say, a given student whose academic record gave her a 40-percent chance of
admissions would have nearly a 60-percent chance if she were a legacy.
The children of alumni generally make up 10 to 25 percent of the student
body at selective institutions. The proportion varies little from year to
year, suggesting "an informal quota system," says the former Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Golden. By contrast, at the California Institute of
Technology, which does not use legacy preferences, only 1.5 percent of
students are children of alumni.
2. Legacy preferences have an honorable history of fostering loyalty at
America's great institutions of higher learning.
In fact, as Peter Schmidt, of The Chronicle, notes, legacies originated
following World War I as a reaction to an influx of immigrant students,
particularly Jews, into America's selective colleges. As Jews often
outcompeted traditional constituencies on standard meritocratic criteria,
universities adopted Jewish quotas. When explicit quotas became hard to
defend, the universities began to use more-indirect means to limit Jewish
enrollment, including considerations of "character," geographic diversity,
and legacy status.
3. Legacy preferences are a necessary evil to support the financial vitality
of colleges and universities—including the ability to provide scholarships
for low-income and working-class students.
While universities claim that legacy preferences are necessary to improve
fund raising, there is little empirical evidence to support the contention.
In fact, several colleges and universities that do not employ legacy
preferences nevertheless do well financially. As Golden notes, Caltech
raised $71-million in alumni donations in 2008, almost as much as the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($77-million), even though MIT, which
does provide legacy preferences, is five times the size and has many more
alumni to tap. Berea College, in Kentucky, favors low-income students, not
alumni, yet has a larger endowment than Middlebury, Oberlin, Vassar, and
Bowdoin. And Cooper Union, in New York City, does not provide legacy
preference but has an endowment larger than that of Bucknell, Haverford, and
Davidson.
Moreover, a study included in our new book, Affirmative Action for the Rich,
finds no evidence that alumni preferences increase giving. Chad Coffman, of
Winnemac Consulting, and his co-authors examined alumni giving from 1998 to
2007 at the top 100 national universities (as ranked by U.S. News & World
Report) to test the relationship between giving and the existence of alumni
preferences in admissions. They found that institutions with preferences for
children of alumni did have higher annual giving per alumnus ($317 versus $
201), but that the advantage resulted because the alumni in colleges with
alumni preferences tended to be wealthier. Controlling for the wealth of
alumni, they found "no evidence that legacy-preference policies themselves
exert an influence on giving behavior." After controls, alumni of legacy-
granting institutions gave only $15.39 more per year, on average, but even
that slight advantage was uncertain from a statistical perspective. Coffman
and his colleagues conclude: "After inclusion of appropriate controls,
including wealth, there is no statistically significant evidence of a causal
relationship between legacy-preference policies and total alumni giving at
top universities."
The researchers also examined giving at seven institutions that dropped
legacy preferences during the period of the study. They found "no short-term
measurable reduction in alumni giving as a result of abolishing legacy
preferences." For example, after Texas A&M eliminated the use of legacy
preferences, in 2004, donations took a small hit, but then they increased
substantially from 2005 to 2007.
Nor can legacy preferences be said to be necessary for colleges to maintain
high standards of excellence. It is intriguing to note that, among the top
10 universities in the world in 2008, according to the widely cited Shanghai
Jiao Tong University rankings, are four (Caltech, the University of
California at Berkeley, the University of Oxford, and the University of
Cambridge) that do not employ legacy preferences.
4. After a generation of affirmative action, legacy preferences are finally
beginning to help families of color. Pulling the rug out now would hurt
minority students.
In fact, legacy preferences continue to disproportionately hurt students of
color. John Brittain, a former chief counsel at the Lawyers Committee for
Civil Rights, and the attorney Eric Bloom note that underrepresented
minorities make up 12.5 percent of the applicant pool at selective colleges
and universities but only 6.7 percent of the legacy-applicant pool. At Texas
A&M, 321 of the legacy admits in 2002 were white, while only three were
black and 25 Hispanic. At Harvard, only 7.6 percent of legacy admits in 2002
were underrepresented minorities, compared with 17.8 percent of all
students. At the University of Virginia, 91 percent of early-decision legacy
admits in 2002 were white, 1.6 percent black, and 0.5 percent Hispanic.
Moreover, this disparate impact is likely to extend far into the future. In
2008, African-Americans and Latinos made up more than 30 percent of the
traditional college-aged population but little more than 10 percent of the
enrollees at the U.S. News's top 50 national universities.
5. An attack on legacy preferences could indirectly hurt affirmative-action
policies by suggesting that "merit" is the only permissible basis for
admissions.
The elimination of legacy preferences would not threaten the future of
affirmative action, because the justifications are entirely different.
Affirmative-action policies to date have survived strict scrutiny because
they enhance educational diversity. (For some members of the Supreme Court,
though not a majority, affirmative action also has been justified as a
remedy for centuries of brutal discrimination.) Legacy preferences, by
contrast, have no such justification.
Because they disproportionately benefit whites, legacy preferences reduce,
rather than enhance, racial and ethnic diversity in higher education. And
rather than being a remedy for discrimination, they were born of
discrimination. Affirmative action engenders enormous controversy because it
pits two great principles against each other—the antidiscrimination
principle, which says we should not classify people by ancestry, and the
anti-subordination principle, which says we must make efforts to stamp out
illegitimate hierarchies. Legacy preferences, by contrast, advance neither
principle: They explicitly classify individuals by bloodline and do so in a
way that compounds existing hierarchy.
6. Legacy preferences may be unfair, but they are not illegal. Unlike
discrimination based on race, which is forbidden under the 14th Amendment,
it is perfectly legal to discriminate based on legacy status, as the courts
have held.
Remarkably, legacy preferences have been litigated only once in federal
court, by an applicant to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
named Jane Cheryl Rosenstock, in the 1970s. A New York resident whose
application was rejected, she claimed that her constitutional rights were
violated by a variety of preferences, including those for in-state
applicants, minorities, low-income students, athletes, and legacies.
Rosenstock was not a particularly compelling candidate—her combined SAT
score was about 850 on a 1600-point scale, substantially lower than most out
-of-state applicants—and she was also a weak litigant. She never argued
that, because legacy preferences are hereditary, they presented a "suspect"
classification that should be judged by the "strict scrutiny" standard under
the amendment's equal-protection clause.
The district-court judge in the case, Rosenstock v. Board of Governors of
the University of North Carolina, held that it was rational to believe that
alumni preferences translate into additional revenue to universities,
although absolutely no evidence was provided for that contention. The
decision was never appealed. As Judge Boyce F. Martin Jr. of the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit notes, the 1976 opinion upholding legacy
preferences in Rosenstock addressed the issue "in a scant five sentences"
and is "neither binding nor persuasive to future courts."
A generation later, two new legal theories are available to challenge legacy
preferences. First, Carlton Larson, a law professor at the University of
California at Davis, lays out the case that legacy preferences at public
universities violate a little-litigated constitutional provision that "no
state shall ... grant any Title of Nobility." Examining the early history of
the country, Larson makes a compelling case that this prohibition should
not be interpreted narrowly as simply prohibiting the naming of individuals
as dukes or earls, but more broadly, to prohibit "government-sponsored
hereditary privileges"—including legacy preferences at public universities.
Reviewing debates in the Revolutionary era, he concludes: "Legacy
preferences at exclusive public universities were precisely the type of
hereditary privilege that the Revolutionary generation sought to destroy
forever." The founders, Larson writes, would have resisted "with every fiber
of their being" the idea of state-supported-university admissions based
even in part on ancestry.
Second, the attorneys Steve Shadowen and Sozi Tulante argue that legacy
preferences are a violation of the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause.
While the amendment was aimed primarily at stamping out discrimination
against black Americans, it also extends more broadly to what Justice Potter
Stewart called "preference based on lineage." Individuals are to be judged
on their own merits, not by what their parents do, which is why the courts
have applied heightened scrutiny to laws that punish children born out of
wedlock, or whose parents came to this country illegally.
Shadowen and Tulante argue that legacy preferences at private universities,
too, are illegal, under the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Unlike Title VI of the
1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination only on the basis of "
race, color, or national origin," the 1866 law prohibits discrimination on
the basis of both "race" and "ancestry."
7. Legacy preferences—like affirmative action, geographic preferences, and
athletics preferences—are protected by academic freedom, especially at
private universities and colleges.
It is true that the courts have recognized that colleges and universities
should be given leeway in admissions in order to promote academic freedom.
But that freedom is not unlimited, even at private institutions. As Peter
Schmidt notes, the Supreme Court held, in Runyon v. McCrary (1976), that
private schools could not engage in racial discrimination in admissions. In
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), it struck down the
use of racial quotas. And in the 2003 Gratz v. Bollinger decision, the court
invalidated a policy that awarded bonus points to minority students.
Ancestry discrimination—providing a leg up in admissions based not on merit
but on whether a student's parents or grandparents attended a particular
university or college—likewise falls outside the protected zone of academic
freedom.
8. Legacy preferences have been around a long time and are unlikely to ever
go away, because powerful political forces support them.
In fact, legacy preferences are not only legally vulnerable; they are
politically vulnerable as well. Polls find that Americans oppose legacy
preferences by 75 percent to 23 percent, and in the past decade or so, 16
leading institutions have abandoned them. As affirmative-action programs
come under increasing attack, legacy preferences become even harder to
justify politically.
Moreover, as a matter of tax law, legacy preferences are fundamentally
unstable. Assuming it is true that they entice alumni to provide larger
donations than they otherwise would—a claim that has not been empirically
proven—then IRS regulations raise questions about whether those donations
should be tax deductible. If universities and colleges are conferring a
monetary benefit in exchange for donations, then the arrangement, writes the
journalist Peter Sacks, "shatters the first principle underlying the
charitable deduction, that donations to nonprofit organizations not 'enrich
the giver.'" The IRS regulations place universities in a legal Catch-22:
Either donations are not linked to legacy preferences, in which case the
fundamental rationale for ancestry discrimination is flawed; or giving is
linked to legacy preferences, in which case donations should not be tax
deductible.
9. Legacy preferences don't keep nonlegacy applicants out of college
entirely. They just reduce the chances of going to a particular selective
college, so the stakes are low.
True, legacy preferences don't bar students from attending college at all.
But the benefits of attending a selective institution are substantial. For
one thing, wealthy selective colleges tend to spend a great deal more on
students' education. Research finds that the least-selective colleges spend
about $12,000 per student annually, compared with $92,000 per student at the
most-selective ones. In addition, wealthy selective institutions provide
much greater subsidies for families. At the wealthiest 10 percent of
institutions, students pay, on average, just 20 cents in fees for every
dollar the college spends on them, while at the poorest 10 percent of
institutions, students pay 78 cents for every dollar spent on them.
Furthermore, selective colleges are better than less-selective institutions
at graduating equally qualified students. And future earnings are, on
average, 45 percent higher for students who graduated from more-selective
institutions than for those from less-selective ones, and the difference in
earnings ends up being widest among low-income students. Finally, according
to research by the political scientist Thomas Dye, 54 percent of America's
corporate leaders and 42 percent of governmental leaders are graduates of
just 12 institutions. For all those reasons, legacy preferences matter.
10. Everyone does it. Legacies are just an inherent reality in higher
education throughout the world.
In fact, as Daniel Golden writes, legacy preferences are "virtually unknown
in the rest of the world"; they are "an almost exclusively American custom."
The irony, of course, is that while legacies are uniquely American, they
are also deeply un-American, as Michael Lind, of the New America Foundation,
has argued.
Thomas Jefferson famously sought to promote in America a "natural
aristocracy" based on "virtue and talent," rather than an "artificial
aristocracy" based on wealth. "By reserving places on campus for members of
the pseudo-aristocracy of 'wealth and birth,'" Lind writes, "legacy
preferences introduce an aristocratic snake into the democratic republican
Garden of Eden."
For the most part, American higher education has sought to democratize,
opening its doors to women, to people of color, and to the financially needy
. Legacy preferences are an outlier in that trend, a relic that has no place
in American society. In a fundamental sense, this nation's first two great
wars—the Revolution and the Civil War—were fought to defeat different
forms of aristocracy. That this remnant of ancestry-based discrimination
still survives—in American higher education, of all places—is truly
breathtaking.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is the
editor of Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College
Admissions, being published this month by the Century Foundation Press.
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发帖数: 905
1 (共1页)
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Reno有什么好玩的地方吗?看这篇NYT以后affirmative action要按收入财产鉴别 (转载)
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相关话题的讨论汇总
话题: legacy话题: alumni话题: percent