A classmate wrote me:
"Legacy admissions are unsupportable and ridiculous."
That is the opinion of most people, I realize. Giving special advantage to "legacy" applicants looks like the perpetuation of privilege. And it is. Children of Harvard graduates are likely to have grown up in relative economic and educational privilege. It also perpetuates privilege of Whites, since historically the demographic makeup of Harvard students skewed more White than the general public.
But there are arguments on the other side. Classmate Stan Werlin and I share the opinion that legacy admissions are harmless. With the huge surplus of extraordinary candidates, anyone admitted is fully qualified and prepared to thrive, so why not pick a class that fosters tradition and ties to the institution?
College classmate Stan Werlin was a "legacy." After college Stan got an MBA at Wharton and then had a long career doing business development at Arthur D. Little, the management consultancy. Now, in retirement, he writes poetry and short stories which have appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, the Los Angeles Review and over a dozen other publications.
The young man on the right is the Stan Werlin who was admitted to the college back in 1967. The photo is drawn from the Freshman Register, a book of faces and short biographies of the incoming freshman class. The Freshman Register was an early and printed predecessor of Facebook.
.Guest Post by Stan Werlin
Is there any consequential harm done to the entire pool of Harvard applicants when a legacy applicant completely capable of doing well academically and graduating successfully is admitted? It's true that that legacy applicant takes the place of a presumably fully capable non-legacy applicant but I struggle to see why that matters in the context of a pool of thousands and thousands of fully capable applicants, any random selection of whom these days would compose a superb class. My Harvard classmates collectively conduct dozens, perhaps hundreds, of applicant interviews every year, and see incredibly talented applicants - legacy and non-legacy - who are not among those offered admission to Harvard. With an admission rate this year of 3.41%, the competition is beyond fierce. Here's an example: a National Merit Scholar who had her own research published as a coauthor with a professor in her city. She examined irregularities in frogs in an irrigation ditch, tying the irregularities to fertilizer runoff levels. She was charming, popular, active in extracurriculars. Straight-A grades forever. Sorry, said Harvard. In looking at the many factors that we believe colleges consider in their admissions calculus, I posit that there's defensible value in including tradition and continuity among them, even if the value is intangible.
It seems to me that the only legitimate concern about legacy applicants should be if such an applicant is without the academic and other skills deemed necessary by the Admissions Committee but is nevertheless admitted as a benefit of their legacy status. One might then argue that such a legacy applicant undeserving of matriculation deprived a stronger non-legacy applicant of the opportunity to go to Harvard. It would be interesting to see data on legacy admissions that might peel back the onion on undeserving legacy applicants. Good luck with that.
In my own case, my father went to Harvard and Harvard Law School. He donated modestly to Harvard but was in no way a donor whose financial contributions would motivate Harvard to admit me. I had the goods academically and non-academically to be admitted without any legacy influence, but can’t possibly know if my dad's status had any bearing on my April, 1967 acceptance letter. Am I a legacy admission? I don’t feel as if privilege got me in the door. I do feel that I earned admission based on my own record , that as a student I was comparable to the majority of classmates I knew in terms of academic capability (but certainly was not among the many more who were truly incredibly gifted and talented) and that I graduated successfully based on my own doing. But I suppose I’ll always wonder about my admission in that respect.
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Tomorrow I will share my own thoughts. I was not a legacy applicant, but I think the policy of giving modest advantage to people with historic or even financial connection to the institution is not merely harmless; the policy is wise. I focus on the community-building and tradition-enhancing values. I recognize that some people will strongly disagree.
You might want to read Kurt Vonnegut's great short story about Harrison Bergeron. "Legacy" admissions, even for highly qualified candidates, might look find from the inside but, from the outside, they are little more than an entirely non-equitable continuation of privilege. Justify it as harmless all you want but its not. If you, or your guest columnists are qualified (and I don't doubt you are) then can compete fairly with everybody else, irrespective of where their parents when to school.
George W. Bush was a legacy admit to Yale. Case closed.