Legacies Versus Affirmative Action Admits
Earlier this week, ZeroHedge reported that, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning affirmative action last week, Boston-area civil rights groups were challenging Harvard's legacy admissions, which they say favor whites. ZeroHedge noted that the civil rights groups' complaint cited a Duke research paper. The lead author on that paper is an economist named Peter S. Arcidiacono. The same Professor Arcidiacono already crunched the numbers on how much preference white Harvard legacies get, and it's probably a lot less than the civil rights groups imagine.
To put their preference in context, consider first the level of preference black affirmative action admits were getting at Harvard: they were over-represented by a factor of about 20, or 2,000%.
So for every true black genius at Harvard there were essentially 19 or 20 affirmative action admits.
— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) July 1, 2023
That's how we end up with mediocrities like Ketanji Jackson in elite positions.
In contrast, white legacy admits and athletes were overrepresented by a factor of about 3%.
If white applicants were selected purely on academic merit (so legacies who didn't measure up were excluded), the white share of admits would have dropped from 37.61% to 36.54%.
— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) July 1, 2023
So about 3% of whites would have been eliminated w/o preferences, versus about 95% of blacks. pic.twitter.com/s0x90ybxeH
Be Careful What You Wish For
That most white legacies would have qualified to get into Harvard without their legacy preferences shouldn't be surprising. Intelligence, like every other attribute, is largely hereditary. If one of your parents was smart enough to get into Harvard on merit, there's a good chance you would be smart enough too. But let's consider what would happen if these so-called civil rights groups succeed in eliminating preferences for legacies.
According to the data above, the white share of Harvard admits will drop by about 3%, but the black share will drop by about 95%. The one thing that could artificially raise the black share of Harvard admits after the elimination of racial preferences is legacy preferences. According to Professor Arcidiacono's data, without any preferences, black students would make up 0.76% of Harvard admits, versus about 15% now. But all children of that 15% would qualify as legacies. So if these groups succeed in eliminating legacy admissions, black legacy applicants would be hurt by that most of all.
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Thursday Night Update
I didn't see this until about midnight Thursday, but it turns out Ann Coulter published a column making the same points as me on Thursday: The Truth About Legacies. A few brief excerpts:
Unfortunately, much like #BlackLivesMatter, this latest orgy of hatred for whites is going to end up hurting black people the most. [...]
Comparing three preferences given to college applicants — legacies, athletes and blacks/Hispanics — the children of alumni got the smallest boost, according to a 2007 Princeton study of 4,000 students entering 28 selective colleges in 1999. A majority of legacy admissions had SATs above their college’s average. Even those below the average were only slightly below it, 47 points out of a possible 1,600.
By contrast, 77% of blacks and Hispanics had scores below their college’s average, and 70% of athletes did. Combined, their average gap was 108 points.
A 2009 Harvard study found that legacy applicants to the top 30 most selective colleges had a mean score 10 points higher on the reading SAT than non-legacy applicants and six points higher on the math SAT. [...]
I hold no brief for legacies, but I do know that I.Q. is heritable, and the kids of alumni are in a wholly different category from the kids of big donors. One is Aage Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics 53 years after his father, Niels, did. [...]
Ironically, getting rid of preferences for legacies will hurt black applicants the most. Recall that colleges have been giving gigantic racial preferences to black applicants since the 1960s, which means we have more than half a century of black graduates whose children and grandchildren are … guess what? Legacies!
Children of alums who got in to college on the basis of anything other than merit, as a group, will tend to be less qualified than the children of alums who got in on merit.
Get rid of the legacy preference, and it’s the kids of affirmative action alums who won’t get in.
