Legacy Admissions Advantages

Many middle to lower class families cannot afford to send their kids to school and with Ivy League schools like Harvard and Princeton giving out generous financial packages to their student, who mostly come from wealthy background. The poorer students are on the losing end because they are not given the opportunity for aid. As Terry Hartle, the senior vice president of the American Council of Education, says, "Smart poor kids go to college at the same rate as stupid rich kids." What this is saying is that the wealthy families have vastly more opportunity to succeed in the college system even though they have equal or lesser smarts. Well respected schools such as NYU are now admitting students based on the financial fit not by merit.

As a graduate student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, I had the opportunity to enhance my understanding of higher education through my coursework, and involvement with on campus organizations. While a graduate student, I also worked in both the student affairs and academic advising department and, I was able to conduct research as part of course assignments. As a non-traditional, first-generation undergraduate student, I found particular interest in research topics involving non-traditional students like myself. I found interest in the history of financial aid and the admission process in regards to a student who took less traditional routes to access higher education.

Recently there has been a lot of debate about the importance of college education. Students are asking if it’s worth the debt to attend a four year university or community college. Some are thinking what are the benefits of a degree is in the workforce. With college tuition increasing and state fundings lowering, low income students are struggling to attain a higher education. College institutions should have a role to provide students higher education and equal opportunity to students to increase social mobility yet intergenerational reproduction of privilege has produced inequality in education.

If HBCUs are to survive, they must increase financial contributions from alumni. This is particularly true at private institutions, where there is little or no revenue from states, upon which public institutions rely heavily. Alumni giving at public HBCUs is also becoming increasingly important because state funding is decreasing and the overall funding received from states is not on par with their majority institution counterparts (Gasman, 2010). HBCUs must enhance their alumni fundraising results in order to generate revenue to sustain them. Understanding the motivators to alumni giving at HBCUs can be critical to helping them improve alumni giving rates, and thus, the amount provided by them. There have been many research studies to determine the factors that affect alumni giving. One study found that there is a positive correlation between alumni perceptions of their undergraduate experience and their chances of financially supporting and participating with their institution (Gaier, 2005). Institutions should understand the key factors that contribute to those alumni perceptions so that they can make operational decisions designed to improve student

• Why not add alumni children to the list of favorable treatment in admission process?

Stanford students David Sacks and Peter Thiel describe how, “rather than fostering harmony and integration, preferences have divided the campus… if preferences were truly meant to remedy disadvantage, they would be given on the basis of disadvantage, not on the basis of race.” The bias present in Affirmative Action does not mend what it was originally put in place to fix, discrimination of the disadvantaged. Instead, it misplaces students who are qualified. The unfavorable system of preferential admission disregards a more promising system of admittance.

However, when a student wants to attend college after high school, the chances of going to any school of his or her choice can seem unfair and have unequal opportunity to other peers. Unfortunately the idea of being limited to attending certain schools has a big influence in chances of becoming successful. Even though higher educations seems to have a direct path for high wages, the access to college can have reverse effects on intergenerational mobility. By limiting access from someone in a bottom percentile to have the possibility to attend a good college harms their upward mobility. In efforts to help breakdown an understanding of how education affects intergenerational mobility, a study called Mobility reports cards show significant findings. Mobility reports cards were conducted by collecting administrative data from more then thirty million college students in the years of 1999-2013. “We obtain rosters of attendance at all Title-IV accredited institutions of higher education in the U.S using de-identified data from federal income tax returns combined with data from the National Student Loan Data System. We obtain information on students’ earnings in early adulthood and their parents’ incomes from tax records.”

As Peter Schmidt of the chronicle says, legacies originated after World War I to support the immigrant students, particularly Jews. When it became harder to control Jewish enrollment, in 1920’s most respected universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton considered legacy status. Since then it has raised the concerns for lower class families who did not attend good universities and their children wanted to attend but ended up not getting admission. In 2003, Senator Edward Kennedy sought legislation to compel colleges to make public their data on legacy admissions. It didn’t pass due to higher education’s powerful lobbying. Legacy admission should not be allowed since it promotes discrimination, lowers academic competition,

Deborah Caldwell shares her emotional experiences with the college education system in her essay “My Son Was Accepted to a College He Can’t Afford. Now What?” that I hope will not reflect my own. I am a High School Senior who is planning to attend college in the upcoming term, going through the selection process just as Caldwell describes. Just like my mother, She takes pride in the achievements of her children and is proud they are accepted to prestigious schools for all their hard work. I see my family through her experiences as the year unfolds and I apply for federal aid. Just like many other middle class families, we are neither rich enough to afford university tuition without aid nor poor enough to qualify for government assistance programs.

Jerome Karabel has explored many areas of the college admissions process and is unhappy with his findings. In his text, “The Battle Over Merit”, Karabel concludes that the college admissions process has to be updated, so that everyone gets a fair and equal chance to get into these institutions. He includes a substantial argument of how college admissions have evolved and has been initially favoring one social group. This justification shows the concept of privilege and a need for inclusion. Karabel believes that race shouldn 't be a factor of change, but socio-economic backgrounds should be a way for students to get help and get into these schools, because they need it the most. He also brings up the idea of power and politics and that the

“If we cut down on the number of legacy admissions, what would happen to the college budget? We might not even be able to keep things running!” Slippery Slope

The author felt very strongly about the need to get rid of exclusive preference for legacies or other special qualities in students that did not relate to academic achievement. Golden felt strongly about this matter when was writing for The Wall Street Journal. He had done a lot of research and discovered how dishonest Ivy League schools were being in their acceptance process. He interviewed many people, and sympathized with the intelligent students who did not get into their college of choice because they weren’t financially or socially satisfactory for the school. Many of the rich he tried to contact refused an interview, which Golden proves as their embarrassment to how they were admitted. He has many suggestions to help improve how Ivy League schools can better their acceptance process.

The equal opportunity that affirmative action provides has also increased the amount of minority applicants applying to each school. It has “resulted in doubling or tripling the number of minority applications to colleges or universities, and have made colleges and universities more representative of their surrounding community” (Messerli). Since the playing field has been evened, it has encouraged more of those who are disadvantaged because of their ethnicity to apply for and get admitted into college. However, the quotas cause schools to admit under qualified students of minor races who don’t meet the limit over highly qualified students who’s race has reached the limit.

1. “If we cut down on the number of legacy admissions, what would happen to the college budget? We might not even be able to keep things running!”

Just as Affirmative Action can be utilized within the admission process for college institutions, it can be used in the financial aid decisions for student’s funding of their education. And, while the decisions for college admissions can be based in part of affirmative action pending the institution’s election of voluntary, race-neutral, or race-conscious admissions – Federal financial aid must have specific boundaries as well. Chace (2012) states a structure of financial aid and admissions systems within a higher education institution give clear indications to incoming students what a school’s value and mission may be, without having to say it distinctly word for word.