In today’s New York Times, Harvard graduate Evan J. Mandery has published a call to “End College Legacy Preferences.”   Mandery’s news hook for the column was the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Schuette v. BAMN, which  held that it is constitutional for a state’s voters to ban the use of race preferences in university admissions (even if such preferences are constitutional under the Court’s earlier precedents.) Mandery noted that universities also give substantial preferences to children of alumni.  At his alma mater, for example, the legacy acceptance rate is about five times higher than the overall rate.  Mandery notes that admitted Harvard legacies’ SAT scores are just two points worse than those of admitted students, but the preference may be larger at other highly selective institutions: a team of researchers at Princeton found that legacy preference was worth about 160 points (out of 1600) on the SAT I.

Opponents of race preferences  frequently oppose legacy preferences. Both legacy and race preferences can place students in environments where they learn less than they otherwise would because of the gaps in credentials between students receiving preferences and the median student: a paper studying legacy and race preferences at Duke University found that both legacies and race preference recipients performed less well than other students because of their relatively low entering credentials.  Because of the credential gap, both legacy students and race preference recipients at Duke were also disproportionately unlikely to persist with an initial ambition to study science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or economics — traditionally some of the most difficult majors on many campuses and thus those most likely to lose students with entering credentials below those of the median student.

Gail Heriot, another member of the New American Civil Rights Project, also earlier offered thoughts on legacy and race preferences at The Right Coast.