Banning legacy admissions also would require a rather drastic insertion of the federal government into the business and admissions practices of private-sector universities, especially once enforcement issues are considered. (“Well, we didn’t accept you *just* because your dad went here.”) Still, I don’t expect conservative politicians to go to the mat for Yale or Dartmouth, even though the libertarian strand of Republican Party thought would suggest doing so.
As for me, I teach at a state university—George Mason University—that accepts about 90% of all applicants. If someone has a chance of succeeding, we offer them the opportunity to show that. Not all institutions can or should work this way, but mine is an inclusive university, and I am proud of that.
I thus have the luxury of opposing the new anti-legacy-admissions bill for two mutually reinforcing reasons. First, it reflects an unjustified expansion of federal powers over higher education. Even if you are anti-legacy, or want to rein in the Ivy League, you may not be happy about how those federal powers will be used the next time around.
Second, I do not mind a world where America’s top schools practice and implicitly endorse trickle-down economics. Someone has to carry the banner forward, and perhaps someday this Trojan horse will prove decisive in intellectual battle. In the meantime, I have my cudgel—hypocrisy among the educational elite—and I, too, can feel better about myself.
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.