Recently, President Christina Paxson P’19 published the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, a 19-page proposal announcing her intention to spend over $150 million to create “a just and inclusive campus” with “a concrete set of actions to promote diversity and inclusion and confront the issues of racism, power, privilege, inequity and injustice.” But while the proposal plans to increase financial support for low-income students, double the number of underrepresented minority faculty members and expand Brown’s focus on race and social justice, the plan fails tremendously to address one of the University’s most egregious injustices: affirmative action for the rich, known euphemistically to us as legacy admission.
Overall, legacies compose between 10 and 15 percent of the undergraduate population at Princeton. Brown has not released statistics on legacies in the undergraduate population in years, but it is fair to assume Brown’s numbers fall somewhere in the ballpark of Princeton’s. If you want to visualize this, just keep in mind that only 12.9 percent of Brown’s population is Asian and 6.7 percent African-American. Moreover, Ivy League legacy acceptance rates are typically two to five times those of overall acceptance rates.
Brown claimed in 2006 that it had admitted 33.5 percent of alums’ children, in contrast to the 13.8 percent overall admission rate the same year. To put that into perspective, while the Class of 2019 acceptance rate was 8.5 percent, the acceptance rate for applicants with 800 Critical Reading SAT scores was just 22.8 percent and the rate for valedictorians was just 18.5 percent. In 2009, Princeton admitted 41.7 percent of legacy applicants, a rate 4.5 times that of non-legacy applicants. Based upon this, it seems that admission to the Ivy League is not about getting good grades; rather, it is about getting adopted.
Of course, legacy students might be more qualified than the general applicant body. Legacy students, by definition, come from educated backgrounds. But legacy acceptance rates do not reflect any “slight” qualification disparity. They are documentable, statistical imperfections in the well-woven lies of the elite, one of the countless illustrations of how they game the system through embedded societal norms.
Legacy admission perpetuates the power of the elite and educated, acting as a hindrance to the lofty images of meritocracy that admission offices peddle. But this phenomenon is not exclusive to the Ivy League; it is systemic. In almost three-quarters of research universities and nearly all liberal arts colleges, legacy students are given preference in admission. According to a study of 180,000 student records conducted in 2005, within a given SAT score range, the legacy title increases one’s chances of admission to a selective institution by 19.7 percent. After entering college, legacies, almost without exception, typically perform worse than the general student body during their undergraduate careers. Legacy is not a representation of the dedication, hard work or virtue of an applicant. Instead, it is a representation of wealth and birthright, a direct contradiction to the idea that “all men are created equal,” a perpetuation of an antiquated notion that some people are just born better.
Even before universities consider legacy status, we must understand that legacies have access to more opportunities than the rest of the applicant pool. Because many alums of elite universities are richer than the general populace, legacies have access to resources like SAT and ACT tutoring. Moreover, it is no secret that absurdly expensive “college counselors” can be hired to edit, or even write, Common App essays. Even if families are unwilling to go to such depraved lengths to get ahead, Ivy League alums are also well-connected and can thus provide their children with research opportunities and superior letters of recommendation. These students are fully capable of high achievement and should be last in line to receive any sort of extra assistance in admission.
Universities give us two justifications for legacy admission. The first is based on tradition — claiming that legacy students should be prioritized because their families have laid the foundations upon which the university stands. But this argument is fundamentally elitist and aristocratic, postulating that tradition is more important than fairness and merit, that having a single parent who has attended Brown can be more important than individual achievement.
The second is economic, and it is slightly more convincing: Brown wants money. Because accepting alums’ children creates a concrete incentive for alums to donate, Brown needs legacy to remain solvent. But it must be noted that the concept of legacy admission is unheard of in post-secondary institutions in almost every country other than the United States. Even in America, top institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology do not consider legacy in admission. Given that Brown’s endowment is $3.3 billion and its return on investment last year was 5.7 percent, it is likely that Brown would remain solvent even with a decrease in alumni donations. Looking outside Brown, schools like Yale even boast endowment returns each year that are twice as high as the amount of money they use from their endowments per year in an operating budget. Thus, the rationale for legacy policies in the Ivy League is not simply an economic one.
In reality, the reason why we keep legacy is simply that no one cares. While race-based affirmative action policies are the center of heated debate — gargantuan lawsuits have been filed and the Supreme Court has debated it twice now — legacy is taken for granted, and debate over it seems nonexistent. At Brown, this is understandable. The legacy system benefits us because our kids may take advantage of it one day, too.
But if we take a step back into a veil of ignorance, forgoing our selfish tendencies for just a moment, we must recognize that, on principle, legacy is unconscionable and unjustifiable. In our classes, we search for solutions to the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor in the United States. In politics, we look outside of the establishment toward U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT, because he seems to say what everyone else is afraid to: The game is rigged (millionaires and billionaires … middle class … yada yada yada). In the real world, many of us direct our malice upon the villainy of our prison system and the brutality of our police officers in their collective and continual discrimination against their own species.
But in our quest to ingratiate our narcissistic, inflated egos with high-sounding social justice rhetoric followed by inaction, we somehow forget that part of the answer to society’s ills is right here at Brown. We forget that the university to which we pay tuition each year funds an admission office that exacerbates inequality each and every year by rejecting qualified, hopeful students for elite, less-qualified ones.
Sure, all of us can sit back and let legacy continue, reaping the benefits in 30 years or so when our children finally get to exploit the system we helped immortalize. Or we can not embarrass ourselves, speak out and act. As Howard Zinn said, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train” — to be neutral is to perpetuate systemic inequality. Legacy admission is aristocratic in every way (excluding the incest … hopefully); it keeps the moneyed nobility in power through blatant nepotism. As much as the Brown administration tells us that “all of us belong here,” some of us don’t. It is our duty to make sure that all of us do.
Glenn Yu ’19 received preferential treatment in admission as a native Rhode Islander. There is a good chance he doesn’t belong here either. He can be reached at glenn_yu@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
