Legacy Admissions: Part 2

January 10, 2004 1:47 PM

Affirmative Action Texas Style: Part 2

[A]fter consultation with each of the Texas A&M University System Regents, I have decided that, effective immediately, Texas A&M will no longer award points for legacy in the admissions review process.

posted by Steve_at_Linnwood (34 comments total)

An interesting development on a story that was first posted here.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 1:48 PM on January 10, 2004

excellent!
posted by amberglow at 1:52 PM on January 10, 2004

Terrible!
posted by Spacelegoman at 2:00 PM on January 10, 2004

Why? No one should get an advantage getting in just because their parents or grandparents went to that school. Hopefully more schools will follow Texas A&M's lead.
posted by amberglow at 2:06 PM on January 10, 2004

No one should get an advantage getting in just because their parents or grandparents went to that school.

Why not?
posted by rushmc at 2:13 PM on January 10, 2004

If it were any other Texas school than A&M, I might agree with you amberglow...but the Aggies are different. In any case, the formalized version of legacy points only came into play a decade or so ago...I can guarantee you that legacy will still play a role at A&M, it'll just be much more subtle. The Corps will always take care of their own. A huge factor that doesn't really translate outside of Texas is the fact that while A&M is one of the best agriculture colleges in the country...it's still a military school, with military traditions. I doubt most of the legacy kids were liberal arts majors...I'd bet 95% of them were Corps.

And ya know what, if someone wants to be in the military, and wants to be a good and effective leader of his/her troops...and is following in the steps of a parent who dedicated some percentage of their lives to protecting America...then I don't see why they shouldn't get an extra couple of points for it.


(And now, I must go wash my hands, for I have defended A&M...a thing which cannot be sanitary.)
posted by dejah420 at 2:16 PM on January 10, 2004

Why?
What does that have to do with how well you'll perform, or if you should be allowed into a college or not?
posted by amberglow at 2:16 PM on January 10, 2004

For all the talk of the US being a meritocracy, legacy admissions are one of the biggest things working against it.
posted by amberglow at 2:19 PM on January 10, 2004

Rushmc: Because it looks hypocritical to support legacy points while holding affirmative action in disdain. So really, this is just political window dressing. As far as I care they can keep their legacy system if they'd just also use some effective system of creating campus diversity as well.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:20 PM on January 10, 2004

What does [being a legacy] have to do with how well you'll perform, or if you should be allowed into a college or not?

It has little or nothing to do with how you'll perform, but it seems directly relevant to whether or not you should be admitted. 1. Colleges need money. 2. Happy alumni are a good source of money. 3. Alumni are happier when they think that their children are likely to be admitted.


Legacy admissions aren't ideal, but college admission systems are broken in much more serious ways, IMHO.
posted by Zonker at 2:55 PM on January 10, 2004

do you chose to be meritocratic when you're not being racist, amberglow?

i mean, doesn't this mean that rich people won't get into university as easily? yet you objected to rich people losing out to poor people a few moments ago in askme (meta).
posted by andrew cooke at 3:00 PM on January 10, 2004

insert "only" between "meritocratic" and "when". sorry. i'm a bit annoyed (so will now walk away from the keyboard).
posted by andrew cooke at 3:01 PM on January 10, 2004

For a University that previously did not admit Blacks, or Jews, or members of some other group, legacy admissions have the effect of continuing that discrimination. So it's good that this has been stopped, and it will hopefully start a trend that will wipe out legacy admissions across the country.

On the other hand, guess my kids'll have to get into Harvard on their own.
posted by alms at 3:03 PM on January 10, 2004

As long as there is a base level of academic requirements that all applicants must reach to be considered for admission, what is wrong with using other than purely academic scores into consideration?

As an institution, is more value gained from accepting a student with 1310 SAT who is from the same background as 80% of the student population or a student with a 1300 SAT that bring some diversity to the learning environment?

I'm not implying an answer to that question. Sometimes the answer will be yes, while sometimes it will be no. Universities should be able to allowed to consider it.

Legacy admissions, to me, are a completely different argument than the one above. They have nothing to do with the merit of the applicant and simply reinforce homogeneity of the student population.
posted by 4easypayments at 3:06 PM on January 10, 2004

Either nonacademic factors are admissible, or nonacademic factors are not admissible.

If nonacademic factors are not admissible, then clearly "legacy" points are inappropriate.
posted by Sidhedevil at 3:09 PM on January 10, 2004

do you chose to be meritocratic when you're not being racist, amberglow?
Giving the children of alumni points just for being born is quite different from wanting to switch isps because they're firing their US employees. If you can't see a difference, then slur away.
posted by amberglow at 3:52 PM on January 10, 2004

Fight! Fight!
posted by swerdloff at 4:07 PM on January 10, 2004

Something often left out of these debates is the fact that college admissions aren't just a prize to be handed out to an individual, for that individual's benefit. Colleges are institutions that serve society as a whole, and admissions policy should consider the needs of the community. Alumni are indeed a part of that community, but doesn't our need for competent doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc., outweigh the need to placate the privileged?
And yes, I realize that "alumni" doesn't necessarily mean "wealthy", but financial support is often cited as the reason for legacy admissions.
posted by 2sheets at 4:07 PM on January 10, 2004

A contrary opinion would be that placating the priviledged will make them open up their wallets.

This in turn helps the university help needier students who may have been admitted anyway but, without the financial support, would not have been able to attend.

You can call it a necessary evil or playing the game if you like, but that is at least one way in which placating donors serves the needs of the community as a whole.
posted by vacapinta at 4:16 PM on January 10, 2004

I agree with Zonker, and will add that if the the student can't keep up, he won't stay in school.

I'm still having trouble seeing the relationship to a blatantly unconstitutional race-based quota system like "affirmative action", however.
posted by hama7 at 4:20 PM on January 10, 2004

Giving the children of alumni points just for being born is quite different from wanting to switch isps because they're firing their US employees.

How so? You want to give preferential treatment to U.S. citizens, most of whom are such just for being born.
posted by rushmc at 5:08 PM on January 10, 2004

What's all this hogwash about the US being a meritocracy? You're being ironic, right?
posted by pemulis at 6:15 PM on January 10, 2004

It's different ideas of what a university should be. If it's a vocational training ground with scarce spaces, then of course the fairest thing to do is make academic and other worthy achievements the only basis for admission.

The other viewpoint is that a university is an association, part of a community. You can knock that and call it a club, and there's truth to that assertion. There is something neat, though, about the idea that a university is more than a place where you put in your 4 year to trade for a higher earning power. Most of us would probably hope the academy would be seen differently than that, and I think this community idea -- where you keep ties with the particular community of the academy where you attended over the years. And help give your kids a similar experience.

I think there's a lot to be said for that set of values, even while I understand how it conflicts with another set of values (that of giving a worthwhile chance for achievement to anyone qualified, without regard to extraneous background). Just because something conflicts with that value doesn't mean it's evil and without merit. Affirmative action has that problem itself (even though the value it seeks, opportunities for demograpics who have had short shrift or outright denial of opportunities, is a good thing).

Perhaps it might have been better to keep them both until the ethnic/cultural makeup of the university reached some reasonable point (similar demographic makeup to the county, state, or nation, say). Once you reached something like that state, legacy points would hardly be discriminating to any particular ethnicity at all.

Still... if I ran the world, I might think it was best to have an admissions scoring that gave favor points to the qualified poor and ignored racial/ethnic background altogether. But there are even ethical problems with that -- does Johnny Suburb, 3.5 GPA parental income $60,0000 per year, really deserve to have a higher bar to leap at than Joe InnerCity, 3.5 GPA, $21,000 parental income? Failure to make that distinction means abandoning a potential method of aiding upward mobilty. Making that distinction means awards on things other than metrics of merit, and seems unfair too. There isn't an easy solution, and regardless of which value you hold higher, if you can't see the other one, you can't contribute to really solving the problem.
posted by weston at 7:00 PM on January 10, 2004

Argh!

and I think this community idea -- where you keep ties with the particular community of the academy where you attended over the years...

... is something that naturally grows out of the tradition of a western liberal arts education.

That's what I meant to say.
posted by weston at 7:03 PM on January 10, 2004

I'm still having trouble seeing the relationship to a blatantly unconstitutional race-based quota system like "affirmative action", however.

I keep forgetting that you have a constitutional right in the US not to hire people because they're black.
posted by Hildegarde at 7:04 PM on January 10, 2004

I'm still having trouble seeing the relationship to a blatantly unconstitutional race-based quota system like "affirmative action", however.

Have you completely forgotten the Michigan case? They outlawed a specific system favoring race when determining admission, but accepted a more general use of race as a component within a much larger system of decision-making.

Enter Texas, where they have now done exactly the same as Michigan, but as dejah420 pointed out, who will continue to use it as a more discretional component of admission. The similarities here are staggering.

BTW, I don't think I oppose this system, entirely. Like amberglow's decision to focus on American-made products, I think there can, and should, be room to make these types of decisions. We're people who use discretion to make our decisions, and to isolate our discretion to a few specific, measurable traits is to deny our humanity, and to deny our ability to judge not solely based on merit, but character, history, and culture as well.

We choose jobs, friends, even objects, on a more wholistic scale than simple numbers. The decision-making process to choose students should be no different.
posted by BlueTrain at 7:25 PM on January 10, 2004

Well said, weston.
posted by rushmc at 8:23 PM on January 10, 2004

this is a good thing because people asked for change and they got it. i like it when that happens.
posted by kjh at 8:26 PM on January 10, 2004

Regarding amberglow's comparison - I believe the difference is that the ISP, by replacing U.S. citizens, is actively contributing to the decline of the standard of living in the U.S. by putting downward pressure on salaries. Assuming that amberglow lives in the U.S., I can see why he might decide that he did not see value in supporting that, even if it meant a slightly lower price from his ISP.

However, in a admissions situation, legacy points (as they were used at A&M) could result in a less qualified student receiving the benefits of a higher education that arguably could benefit another, more qualified student more. Again, this is exerting downward pressure on the overall academic level of the institution as a whole - although I would think given the statistics cited by A&M that there was much less of an effect than the effect on salaries of outsourcing.
posted by bashos_frog at 8:29 PM on January 10, 2004

Have you completely forgotten the Michigan case?

The details are a little foggy, but do you mean something like this?

"At the undergraduate level, African American students and some Hispanic students and Native American students receive 20 points out of a maximum of 150, not because of any academic achievement or life experience, but solely because they are African American, Hispanic or Native American.

To put this in perspective, a perfect SAT score is worth only 12 points in the Michigan system. Students who accumulate 100 points are generally admitted, so those 20 points awarded solely based on race are often the decisive factor." - President George W. Bush

Contrast this to the Texas A&M case:

"the solidity of the Aggie family and the strength of the Aggie culture are not the result of four out of 100 points on an admissions evaluation. For the three-fourths of our freshmen who were enrolled in the fall of 2003 under the top ten percent law and automatic academic admission, legacy was irrelevant. Indeed, not one student of the more than 10,000 who were admitted was admitted solely on the basis of legacy."

From what I can see, we're talking about four points out of a possible one hundred for the child of a Texas graduate, as opposed to twenty points for skin color in Michigan.

The similarities here are staggering.

I guess if the Texas system were granting points because of skin color, I could see the similarity a little more clearly. The Michigan case is unconstitutional, to boot.

Again, I don't know about awarding points for it, but successive generations of students attending the same University is good for the school in terms of contributions (monetary and otherwise) and reputation. But points are points, I suppose.
posted by hama7 at 8:07 AM on January 11, 2004

This is kind of a side point, but international trade (including outsourcing in service industries) does *not* tend to lower U.S. standard of living. Rather, it will increase the standard of living in both countries. If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Paul Krugman's explanation.
posted by maciej at 4:18 PM on January 11, 2004

I guess if the Texas system were granting points because of skin color, I could see the similarity a little more clearly

That is essentially what is happening with "legacy" admissions. Remember that open racial discrimination is part of the recent school history and thus alumni were/are a part of that sorry history. It follows that gaiing favorable admissions due to your whiteness and that of your parents, who were part of the segregation, brings about a subtle racial discrimination. Not that dropping this rule will change things substantially, the Aggies will find a way to "preserve" their whiteness.
posted by nofundy at 5:07 AM on January 12, 2004

The "keep the alumni happy by admitting their progeny = more cash" argument doesn't really stand up when you think about it.

I mean, how much money is one family willing to give? If they're already donating due to being an alumni, are they really going to spread their wallet that much wider to donate for their kids, too?

Rather than going back to the same well, the university should be looking for untapped wells to dip into. I'd think they'd rather have two potential families to hit up for donations rather than trying to double-dip on one.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 12:57 PM on January 12, 2004

No, GhostintheMachine, you've got it backwards. It's not that "admitting their progeny = more cash," it's that "rejecting their progeny = no more cash." If a college alumn with a history of giving has an 18-year-old child, chances are good that alumn is reaching his peak earning years. Denying that kid admission might that pissed off donor-parent doesn't let you tap his wealth. I know parents who have cut a school out of their wills because their son wasn't admitted to that school's law school.
posted by hhc5 at 5:54 PM on January 12, 2004