Is There An Aristocracy at Columbia?

As the United States Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments about racial preferences and the use of affirmative action in college admissions, several other aspects of the admissions process have come under scrutiny. Among them, the so-called legacy preference has become the subject of wide debate.

Legacy applicants are children of college alumni and are thought to benefit from special consideration by admissions officers.

Although arguments about affirmative action generally fall along party lines--Democrats and liberals endorse the use of racial preferences while Republicans and conservatives deplore them--legacy preferences have emerged as a popular non-partisan target.

Most critics portray legacy preferences as a tool of the fundamentally un-American hereditary aristocracy. Legacies, detractors say, compromise America's democratic spirit. Legacy preferences were first deployed in the early 20th century, along with quotas, to keep Jews out of elite institutions. University administrators feared that with strictly meritocratic methods, Jewish matriculation would surge and Jews would be disproportionately represented.

In a tacit attack on President George W. Bush, a Yale University graduate whose father and grandfather also attended the school, presidential hopeful Senator John Edwards (D--N.C.) proposed eliminating legacy preferences in admissions. In November, he told an audience at the University of Maryland in College Park, "The legacy preference rewards students who had the most advantages to begin with. It is a birthright out of 18th-century British aristocracy, not 21st-century American democracy. It is wrong."

But the attacks are not limited to foes of Bush. In 1990, long before the President took office, then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R--Kans.) called legacy preferences an "unfair advantage" for children of "wealthy contributors" and asked the Office of Civil Rights if they might be illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Office said they were not illegal and that colleges had "legitimate institutional goals" in using them, although it admitted that the preferences widened the gap between the rate of admission for white and Asian applicants.

Merit, Money, and Diversity

The opinions of Edwards and the Office of Civil Rights underscore the two major points in the criticism of legacy preferences. One is that the policy is so little rooted in meritocracy. The other is that by favoring children of traditionally white student bodies, admissions offices undermine their own diversification goals.

Many universities--especially private ones--depend on donations from wealthy alumni to offset the costs of operating a large and complex institution. Last year, Columbia University received $295.7 million in gifts, grants, and contracts, compared with $2 billion in total revenues and $1.89 billion in operating expenses.

Derek Wittner, Columbia College's associate dean for alumni affairs and development, said that Columbia uses the money to increase the quality of education for the student body. Without it, he said, several of the College's essential programs and aid packages would not exist.

But critics such as Jacob Vigdor, assistant professor of public policy studies and economics at Duke, say universities give special consideration to legacies so that happy alumni will keep filling their schools' endowments with money, not as donations earmarked for educational purposes. Such pandering, some say, unfairly disadvantages other applicants and neutralizes the benefits of a wealthy school.

"If you're providing preferences to legacy students rather than the most qualified students, then you're reducing the quality of the peers that any one undergraduate has and that could offset those benefits to some extent," Vigdor said.

At a meeting of the University Senate two weeks ago, Columbia President Lee Bollinger acknowledged Columbia's reliance on alumni giving, but said it was not the only reason to use legacy preferences. He said that legacies help foster a university community which includes, but is not limited to financial support.
"Universities are places that build a sense of community," he said. "Your president would be the last to say that money is not important, but there are other advantages too, such as alumni involvement in the University and in government."

Barnard Dean of Admissions Jennifer Fondiller said that she does not think about the endowment or the effect on alumni donations when she reviews legacy applications.

"I really resist that and I don't get my staff involved in that at all, so they are not aware of those considerations at all when they are reviewing an application. It's something that I am aware of, but I'm very clear to resist," she said.

As the federal Office of Civil Rights hinted when Senator Dole submitted his query, the use of legacy preferences may affect the makeup of the student body. The parents of current applicants were in college when colleges were disproportionately white. It follows, then, that their children are also white, and that legacy preferences may hurt diversification goals.

"If you're trying to attract disadvantaged students of whatever race, the likelihood that they will have had a parent in college or even an older sibling are much less," said Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a think tank that also opposes affirmative action.

Bollinger expressed awareness of this contradiction at the Senate meeting, saying that "there will be a lag as you look at the alumni community in comparison to the current student community ... That should correct itself and is already correcting itself" with the use of affirmative action.

A senior fundraising official for the University argued that admitting legacies actually helps diversification, rather than hurting it. The administrator said that the University saves financial aid dollars on legacy applicants, who are overwhelmingly upper-class white students, and that it can spend the savings helping disadvantaged applicants. The fundraiser also said that wealthy alumni, who stay happy when their children are admitted, do often earmark large donations for financial aid.

Yet Columbia, like most elite institutions, says that its financial aid programs are need-blind anyway, and opponents of legacy preferences say that the special considerations are allowing less merited applicants to get spots they haven't earned. Fondiller does not think those arguments hold water because, she said, it's not as if legacy qualifications are tipping the scale in favor of any student.

"I think that it is fully rooted in merit," she said of the process. "We would never make a decision because a person has a legacy connection. That merit comes in different forms--it's not solely GPA, or solely the level of their curriculum, or solely their SAT scores."

Some university administrators, however, concede that merit has no place in the admissions process. Thomas Dingman, an associate dean at Harvard College, made no bones about it. He expressed the same sentiments as Fondiller, but did not see them as part of a merit-based system.

"The whole thing is not rooted in merit," he said. "If you were going to go that direction, you'd have a computer scan for the top scores and top GPAs. We don't do anything like that. We look for people who have had unusual success in terms of leadership roles, in terms of overcoming adversity, in terms of artistic talent. So right there, you're not going to have a meritocracy."

"We give preference, we say, when all other things are equal," Dingman said.

The Columbia Profile

Eric Furda, Columbia's dean of admissions, did not dismiss the use of merit in admissions, but he noted that merit is relative when you compare different types of students from different types of schools in different parts of the country.

"Meritocracy is a word that really needs to be defined. What is pure in this world? When is an A an A?"

Furda disputed the notion that asking applicants for their legacy histories amounts to a preference at all, returning to the "one factor among many" argument.

"This is a complicated process," he said. "We ask numerous questions on the application to have a sense of the student's background. You read the applications and you really try to get a sense of what this individual student's story is ... Otherwise we might as well do this in a complete vacuum."

He suggested that legacy applicants, including this reporter, weren't getting a break at all. "In some ways, I can say 'I expect more of you as a legacy applicant because you know what this school is about,'" he said.

Furda also rued what he saw as attacks on every aspect of the admissions process. Citing critics of affirmative action and legacy preferences, he noted sarcastically that, "People will be most comfortable when we can't ask any questions anymore, and then we can't do our job."

Both Furda and Fondiller declined to furnish specific data on the rates of legacy application, admissions, or enrollment. Furda said that his office does not cross-reference admissions data by legacy history; Fondiller said that her office does not release those numbers.

But the Sept. 2002 issue of Columbia College Today, the alumni magazine of Columbia College, listed matriculating sons and daughters of alumni. It named 70 students, approximately seven percent of the first-year class. Fondiller hinted that legacy enrollment at Barnard hovered at similar levels.

A story last month in the Wall Street Journal profiled legacy data at several prominent universities and found that of the Ivy League schools it studied, the University of Pennsylvania had the highest rate of legacy enrollment at 14 percent. Harvard clocked in at 13 percent, and Princeton had 11.

Other schools had higher rates of legacy enrollment. As many as 24 percent of the students in Notre Dame's class of 2006 are legacies. Admissions officers and alumni association officials at Harvard, Yale, and Notre Dame did not return repeated calls for comment.

Legacy Politics

Senator Edwards is not the only one curious about legacy preferences. At Columbia, two students have made presentations to the student councils of Columbia College, Barnard, SEAS, and the School of General Studies. Jimmy Dahroug, GS '03, and Josh Joseph, GS '06, asked the councils to release statements requesting that the University's admissions offices "explain their views on the place of legacy in the admissions process, as well as provide any relevant statistics."

They say their goal is "to promote open dialogue in the University community." So far, no councils have taken any action, although Dahroug said he "received an overall positive response."

Columbia College Student Body President Michael Novielli, CC '03, said that his council intended to take no action. So did Barnard's Student Government Association President Laila Shetty, BC '03.

"We as a council thought it was irrelevant to Barnard," she said. "We thought that the way Barnard handles legacy admissions is fine and didn't think this was a big issue."

National politicians have not been nearly as conciliatory. Bush staked out a tough position on affirmative action and filed a friend-of-the-court brief for the petitioner in the Supreme Court case against President Bollinger and the University of Michigan's affirmative action policies. In doing so, Bush deployed the language of meritocracy, claiming that a system used in Texas, wherein the top 10 percent of high school graduates get admission to the state's university, is ideal.

Some observers say that by relying on such a meritocratic system, Bush has committed himself to a position against legacy admissions.

"In order to be consistent, you would have to take similar positions on both issues," said Duke professor Vigdor. But, he said, "it's not clear whether the legacy issue is an issue that's going to have legs--whether it's going to continue to be something that's discussed and debated a year from now when the Supreme Court has made its decision."

Chavez, from the Center for Equal Opportunity, also noted the irony. "As a personal matter, he may want to weigh in. He may feel some awkwardness; he probably was given some benefit by being the son of a Yale graduate."

Several academic policy experts said they did not think a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action would mean significant changes for legacy admission policies unless the universities themselves chose to eliminate the preference.

"What a university could say is 'If we really want to keep the playing field in admissions as level as possible, we need to make this one change to offset the other change," Vigdor said. But he also noted that "one reason that an admissions office might not want to do that is that it would be cutting off their nose to spite their face."

"There are two issues here," said Chavez. "One is the issue of whether it's permissible legally and the other is whether it's good policy. With respect to private institutions, and I think probably with respect to public institutions as well, there's nothing that would particularly cause any concern in the legal area. It's not similar to racial preferences, which I believe are strictly forbidden both by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution with respect to public colleges and universities."

The only way legacy admissions could be legislated, she said, is if state legislatures chose to put a stop to the policy at state universities. "Public universities should be broadly accessible to the citizens of the state in which they operate," she said.