It is hard not to be cynical about the college admissions process.
In the latest effort to encourage more diversity at American colleges and universities, two Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to bar colleges that participate in the federal financial aid program from considering “legacy” status in deciding who gets in. As Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, one of the co-sponsors, explained, "Selecting applicants to universities based off of family names, connections, or the size of their bank accounts creates an un-level playing field for students without those built-in advantages, especially impacting minority and first generation students."
But if we have learned any lessons from the past quarter century, it should be that college officials will look for a way to skirt these restrictions, just as they have with laws limiting the use of race as a primary factor in admissions to favor some groups over others.
Strategies designed to promote racial diversity can just as readily be used to provide cover for legacy admissions, whereby children or grandchildren of alumni or donors receive special preferences. The current trend toward eliminating standardized tests and class rankings for purposes of diversity, or making those tests optional, gives schools even more latitude.
As measures of ability or promise become less objective, legacy students—just like other students with wealth and connections—will be the ones likely to benefit by taking advantage of new rules. Of course, this is the reverse of what the sponsors of the congressional legislation intend. They would reject comparisons to ongoing lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that claim the universities have been discriminating against students in some racial groups at the expense of others.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in these cases in October with a ruling expected next year. The court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978 that colleges could not use race as a primary factor in admissions, but only as a “plus factor.” In Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, the justices stipulated that the policy be “narrowly tailored.”
The only way that plaintiffs in the two court cases might prove they had been discriminated against would be to examine the individual test scores and grade point averages of the various applicants to these schools. That is not readily done because those records are confidential and private.
But the plaintiffs claim that Asian American students in the Harvard case and white and Asian students in the University of North Carolina suit who have test scores (as well as grades and extracurricular resumes) well above the average at the schools were turned down in favor of admitting Black, Hispanic and Native American students whose SAT scores were well below the average.
To get around those measures, admissions officers have used vaguely worded tests of personality or character to boost the portfolios of students from favored groups and scale back the records of students from other groups. Asian applicants argue that they tend to be greatly disfavored by these subjective measures.
The Supreme Court will decide whether or not schools are allowed to tip the scales in these ways. The schools claim such measures are necessary if they are to admit diverse and balanced classes. No matter what the court decides, colleges may look for new ways to arrive at the results they want.