Past legacy admissions practices thankfully long gone--or are they?

I am reading this series of essays entitled: Affirmative Action for the Rich. Issued by the Century Foundation, this series addressed legacy preferences in college admissions. While legacy practices, where children of alumni receive preferential treatment, are less prevalent today, they were once quite commonplace.

I thought it would be interesting to share some of the past practices and policies that were mentioned in this book in an essay by Peter Schmidt, who is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. For example:

+ Between 1900 and 1920, as more Jews emigrated into the United States and their children performed well from outside the elite prep schools, the percentage if Jewish male students at Harvard rose from seven percent of the undergraduate student body in 1900 to 21.5 percent by 1919. Jewish male students accounted for two percent of the senior class of 1903 and nine percent of the class of 1921. It would be more than half a century before either of these schools would admit women. However, the growth in the Jewish population of these schools brought out anti-Semetic beliefs in alumni and administrators, since Jews did not attend the traditional feeder schools.

+ In 1946, following the end of World War II and the availability of educational benefits to veterans through the G.I Bill, Princeton accepted 82 percent of alumni sons who applied for admission that year, compared to less than 38 percent of the 2,000 applicants who had been recently released from military service. This was at a time when less than half of adult Americans had a high school education.

+ By 1958, legacies accounted for about 20 percent of all Princeton students, but about half of the bottom quarter of the admitted applicants. Throughout the 1960's, just before co-education, legacies made up more than half of the Princeton undergraduate student body. This was helped by a school committee network across the country that involved 1,400 alumni.

+ As late as 1974 Yale admitted 49 percent of legacy applicants.

+ The U.S. News rankings, which started in 1983, led schools across the country to increase their outreach to attract legacy applicants. The reason: the magazine based school rankings on the school's financial resources (10 percent), alumni giving (5 percent) and yield, the percentage of accepted applicants who attend. Improvements across all of these numbers would raise school's ranking.

+ As late as 2003, Texas A&M University awarded an additional four points, on a 100 point scale, to legacy applicants. That year, the Houston Chronicle reported that 312 white students, as opposed to 27 Hispanic students and six black students, would not have been admitted had they not been legacies.

+ Thanks to the efforts of a well-organized alumni council and legacy student buddy program, the University of Pennyslvania admitted approximately 42 percent of all legacy applicants who applied early decision in 2008 as well as slightly more than one-third of all applicants who applied through the regular admissions process.

Schmidt and the other authors in this book were selected not only because of their expertise, but also because of their opposition to legacy policies. As I read these essays and find examples such as those listed above, I wonder how far we have really gone to avoid providing spaces to legacy applicants who could have never gained admission on their own. However, even assuming the total removal of legacy admissions, the rich schools--those with the strongest reputations and most bountiful resources--will still get richer.