Now that the Supreme Court has recognized that the affirmative action policies in effect at many colleges and universities are unconstitutional, it is incredible to watch how people have suddenly started caring about the injustice that is legacy admissions. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor discusses legacy applicants and others receiving unearned preferences, such as the children of large donors and professors. She notes that these applicants are disproportionately white and goes on to conclude that, since whites are advantaged by these preferences, they could not possibly be disadvantaged by affirmative action.
What Justice Sotomayor misses here is that what holds in a statistical sense for groups collectively need not describe the experience of all or even most individuals within those groups. Not all white and Asian students have legacies at elite universities. In fact, the overwhelming majority don’t. For the typical white or Asian applicant, the disadvantage created by affirmative action is not cancelled out by an advantage created by legacies.
Rather, the two injustices compound, and the student must face disadvantages from both of them simultaneously. In fact, the statistics that Justice Sotomayor provides on students who are harmed by legacies and other similar unearned preferences show that these students are not just less likely to be white but also significantly more likely to be Asian. As Students for Fair Admissions has shown, it is Asians who are the most adversely affected by affirmative action.
In addition, there is another unearned preference that exists in elite college admissions and receives essentially no attention but is also a grave injustice. When I arrived at Yale as a freshman in the fall of 2006, I met a fair number of students who had received offers of admission not only to Yale but also to Harvard and Princeton and Columbia or MIT. My graduating class at Schreiber High School in Port Washington had been particularly strong that year—with no less than eight Intel semifinalists!—but not a single Schreiber student had received multiple offers from such prestigious universities.
At first, I assumed that these Yale students must be truly impressive. Yet, as I got to know them, I found that many of them were less academically talented than many of my colleagues at Schreiber who had been rejected from Yale. What did these students have in common? Some of them were from groups that are classified as “underrepresented.” The overwhelming majority, though, were from private high schools. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever met a single white or Asian student from a non-magnet public high school who received multiple offers of admission from these universities. Statistics show that my experience is not an aberration. While only 7.4% of American students attend private high schools, a whopping 35% of Yale’s student body comes from these schools.
Given how these policies play out, it is no wonder that there is a disconnect between the elites who benefit from them and the rest of the population. From talking to students at a school like Yale or reading much of what is written in the media, one could be forgiven for thinking that no one but the six justices who were in the majority sees anything wrong with considering race in college admissions. Yet, a recent ABC News poll found that 52% of Americans support the decision, compared with only 32% who oppose it.
It’s easy to support affirmative action when you have a legacy or go to a private school and will never be the one forced to sacrifice what you worked hard to earn. With its concentration of high-achieving Asian and Jewish public school students who are not seen as diverse in the way that matters to these institutions and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, do not have legacies, the North Shore of Long Island has been bearing the brunt of the current system. If we want to have a genuine meritocracy, then let’s abolish all unearned preferences and open the doors of these institutions to students who have for decades faced nearly insurmountable odds in the admissions process.
Sources:
- https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/factsheet_22-23_05302023.pdf
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/184010/school-enrollment-in-public-and-private-institutions-2008/
- https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/americans-approve-supreme-court-decision-restricting-race-college/story?id=100580375
David Golub
Mineola
