When someone brings up where their child got in, a certain silence descends upon the dinner table. The calculations are practically audible. Was it the score on the SAT? The coach of lacrosse? Or, more likely, the application’s last name that coincidentally matches a name engraved on a campus structure. Merit is a topic that Americans enjoy discussing. They feel much less at ease discussing inheritance.
The nation has been telling itself for decades that it rewards hard work. The doors will open if you put in more effort and study more. However, the practice of legacy admissions, which gives applicants with alumni parents a significant advantage, sits right behind those doors and is frequently overlooked in the brochures. The fact that approximately 41% of Harvard’s incoming freshman class in 2017 were legacies says more about American higher education than most policy papers ever could.
Tradition and alumni loyalty, which is another way of saying donations, are often used as justifications for continuing the practice. Seldom do schools publicly acknowledge that aspect. Instead, they talk about a sense of belonging that is passed down through the generations, community, and continuity. It has a cozy sound. Families who already have access to nearly everything else find it incredibly convenient, and it raises a question that no one at the development office really wants to be asked: aside from advantage, what exactly is being passed down here?
The nation was almost shocked when the 2019 college admissions scandal surfaced, in which parents paid William Singer hundreds of thousands of dollars to fabricate test results and crew team careers for their children. But photoshopped rowing photos and Lori Loughlin weren’t really the source of the deeper unease. It was the realization that the side door had always existed, albeit with a different appearance. The legal manifestation of the same instinct is known as legacy preference. Proctor was not bought off. There was no fake script. The solution was merely incorporated into the policy.
Observing how the discussion has changed since the Supreme Court banned racial admissions in 2023 gives the impression that people’s perceptions of these inconsistencies have changed. The logic was that you could remove race from the discussion in the interest of justice. However, legacy preference, which disproportionately favors wealthy and white applicants, remained unchanged for months at the majority of prestigious universities. Since then, a few institutions have abandoned it. The majority haven’t. It is difficult to detect and more difficult to counteract the asymmetry.
What gets lost in these debates is the cost to the kids who are not in the conversation at all. In addition to competing against other talented students, a first-generation applicant from a public school in Ohio, Karachi, or Lagos is also up against a silent thumb on the scale that has nothing to do with what they did or could have done. When you multiply that over decades and application cycles, you get something that resembles a courteous caste system with admissions counselors rather than a meritocracy.
According to philosopher Michael Sandel, the meritocratic narrative is not only false but also actively destructive since it implies that winners deserve everything and losers are solely to blame. You can practically feel the weight of that belief if you stroll through any elite campus quad on a spring afternoon. the assurance. the assurance. How much of it would withstand a candid examination of the family tree underlying each acceptance letter is worth considering.
It’s still unclear if actual reform will occur or if the current scrutiny will wane, as these things frequently do. However, at least the myth is becoming stale. Furthermore, no matter how exquisitely a story is printed on the catalog, it usually loses credibility once it is no longer believed.
