Rejecting policy can preserve legacy

A legacy admissions policy is unfair, but we do not have to reject children of alumni to reject the policy.

Yesterday, we argued that excluding students from the University simply because of who their parents are cannot be justified. There is no documented financial upshot to favoring children of alumni in admissions—in fact, the data suggests that a legacy admissions policy makes no difference in alumni giving rates. And, while children of alumni may bring a valuable enthusiasm for Duke that does benefit our community, this enthusiasm is far from justifying a policy that impedes diversity and penalizes applicants for their pedigree.

A legacy policy is not at all like an affirmative action policy, which seeks to realize the essential value of diversity and to counter histories of discrimination and marginalization. In fact, legacy admissions policies sacrifice these important goals to a lesser one—a marginal boost to school enthusiasm. All of this is unfair, and none of it is justified.

But there is another argument for ending our legacy admissions policy, one that says that ending our legacy admissions policy does not mean giving up the presence of legacy students on campus. This is because children of alumni who are accepted to Duke are, on the whole, quite qualified to attend. We do not need to tip the scale for these students to get into Duke because plenty of them will get into on their own merits.

Data suggests that children of alumni who are accepted and attend Duke tend to be just as qualified as their peers. In 2008, children of alumni made up 20.4 percent of undergraduate students and 44 percent of these students had SAT scores below their class average. Of course, this means that 56 percent had SAT scores above the class average. And, although the 2008 study “A Social Portrait of Legacies at an Elite University” chalks this up to the “somewhat lower levels of precollege achievement” among legacies, this small margin is certainly open to interpretation.

In fact, children of alumni sometimes beat the class average. In a Jan. 31 email to the editorial board, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag indicated that the SAT average for children of alumni in the Class of 2015 was higher than class average on the whole.

It is difficult to make complete sense of this information without more data, but a good explanation for it is that legacy students’ levels of pre-college achievement tend to hover around the class mean as a whole. In other words, legacy students admitted to Duke are qualified to attend—many could gain admission on their own, quite separate from any special consideration they get right now.

If we reject the legacy admissions policy, would the same amount of legacy students end up at Duke? Maybe, or maybe not. But we can be quite certain that rejecting this policy does not mean having to rid our campus of children of alumni, many of whom can get in on their own merits. In other words, we can keep the benefits of a legacy admissions policy without having to endorse a policy that is retrogressive, unjustified and unfair.