RAY RICKMAN: BROWN SHOULD ABOLISH LEGACY ADMISSIONS
Brown University is reviewing its admissions practices following the recent college application cheating scandal, where the rich and famous were rigging standardized tests and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to have their children falsely designated as athletic recruits.
Brown should use this as an opportunity to be a leader in educational equity and abolish legacy preferences. These preferences, which give a formal admissions advantage to the children of Brown graduates, are a clear example of systemic bias. Any legitimate educational reason for giving formalized advantages to students purely on the basis of their pedigree is vastly outweighed by the legacy system’s innate unfairness.
The college application scandal was shocking because of how tawdry the schemes were: bribing an SAT proctor to fix a student’s answers and using Photoshop to falsify pictures “proving” a fraudulent athletic recruit was a water polo star.
However, the admissions scandal was really about the same principle of unearned advantages that the legacy system institutionalizes. Everyone who is outraged about Lori Loughlin’s daughter getting into the University of Southern California with falsified grades should be angry about the thousands of unqualified students who were able to attend an elite school simply because their mother or father were alumni.
The idea of giving a formal admissions advantage to students who already enjoy huge informal advantages should be just as offensive as the tabloid headlines about rigged testing.
These are students who grow up with immense social capital. The children of elite college graduates are often wealthy and almost none are poor. If they didn’t attend private school, they probably went to a top-rated public high school, not a dilapidated urban school with leaking roofs, teacher shortages, and almost no Advanced Placement courses. Their parents can afford SAT tutors and college admissions coaches.
With all these informal advantages, it makes no sense for these students to also get institutionalized special treatment when they apply to their parents’ alma mater.
Race is a major, but unacknowledged, part of the problem with legacy admissions. Because most elite schools were functionally segregated for most of their existence, there are far more white alumni than any other race. It is not a coincidence that the legacy system was created in the 1930s, when elite colleges started to worry about admitting too many Jewish students and too few Anglo-Saxons. No college administrator working today would ever openly endorse a policy that helps white students at the expense of minorities, but that is an unavoidable outcome of legacy admissions.
According to an analysis by The New York Times, African American and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at elite colleges and universities than they were in 1980. At Ivy League schools, African Americans are 9% of the freshman class despite being 15% of college-aged Americans. The statistics are similar at elite liberal arts colleges like Amherst and flagship public universities like UC-Berkeley.
Obviously, legacy admissions are not the only reason for minority under-representation, but it is the easiest to fix.
At a time when affirmative action programs are under siege for undermining so-called meritocracy, legacy admissions — which are simply affirmative action for the predominantly white, usually wealthy children of elite college graduates — have mostly escaped scrutiny. This isn’t a coincidence and it needs to change.
Brown University can be a leader in educational equity by abolishing legacy preferences. With the stroke of a pen, its administration can make college admissions fairer and more accessible to minority, lower income and rural applicants. This would send a clear message that Brown University is doing its part to fully realize the American Dream of upward mobility and earned success.
Ray Rickman is a former state representative, deputy secretary of state, and co-founder of Stages of Freedom, a charity focused on African American empowerment.