If a divided nation can agree on anything, maybe it’s this: Selective colleges run an unfair admissions process, stacking the deck against deserving students. Which ones? That depends on who’s complaining.
Earlier this week, it had seemed that the Trump administration might have been getting ready to turn conservatives’ longstanding complaints into action. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the U.S. Department of Justice planned to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination” in admissions. The next day, a department official told The Chronicle that the internal document cited by the Times did not “reflect a new policy or program or any changes to longstanding DOJ policy.” And further reporting suggested that the department hasn’t declared open season on race-conscious admissions programs.
Still, a wasp nest has been kicked once more. As the age-old debate over affirmative action continues in the Trump era, it’s worth asking how the system is “rigged” — to use one of the president’s favorite words — and for whom. Amid the continuing questions about the fairness of considering the race of underrepresented applicants, let’s not forget the advantages colleges confer on the children of alumni.
“The system is rigged against disadvantaged students, and legacy preferences are the most blatant example,” says Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation who argues for affirmative action based on class rather than race. “One positive dividend of this week’s news may be an increased focus on legacies. People are quite rightly coming out and saying there’s lots of unfairness in the system. That’s healthy.”
Like most everything in the oft-reviled realm of admissions, questions about legacies are complicated. Sure, tales of millionaires and billionaires buying their children entrance to the Ivy League stoke outrage, and understandably so. Of course, most colleges have little in common with Harvard, and many legacies are solid students who don’t fly around on private jets. Even some advocates for underrepresented students say legacies are easy scapegoats for all the inequities in higher education. And colleges aren’t likely to stop coveting the offspring of alumni unless forced to do so, a prospect that, for better or worse, seems unlikely.
Many selective public universities and private colleges have long considered an applicant’s legacy status as one of many factors in admission. Yet “legacy conscious” practices have received less scrutiny than race-conscious ones. “We don’t see challenges to legacies because the vast majority of legacies are wealthy whites,” says Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania. “They benefit and won’t challenge the system.”
Barely a year after the U.S. Supreme Court appeared to issue its final word on this form of affirmative action, the issue is back, following a Justice Department memo that seemed to promise Trump-administration investigations of colleges. Here’s all of The Chronicle’s coverage.
Challenging a system in the courts is both costly and time-consuming. Some legal experts can envision a plaintiff arguing convincingly that a college’s consideration of legacy status has a disparate impact on minority applicants. Yet some of the organizations most inclined to take up that argument, Mr. Kahlenberg speculates, might well lack the resources to support such litigation. Or they might think their resources are better spent supporting race-based policies, which for decades have been under constant attack.
In any case, legacy preferences probably would prove difficult to challenge successfully in the courts. All race-conscious practices are subject to “strict scrutiny review.” That means colleges must clear a high bar when defending them. A slightly lower standard applies to gender-specific practices. Yet for other aspects of a student’s application, the likely standard would require an even lower bar (a “rational basis”) for the challenged policy, says Arthur L. Coleman, managing partner of EducationCounsel LLC, which advises colleges on student-diversity strategies. Factors such as legacy status, family income, and geographic origin aren’t nearly as likely to trigger the same legal alarms as race does.
Other legal experts have challenged that notion, arguing that legacy preferences violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by extending benefits “based on lineage.” But so far apparently no one has made that argument in federal court. When a plaintiff unsuccessfully challenged legacy policies back in the 1970s, she claimed her rights were violated by several other kinds of preferences, too (including those for athletes and in-state applicants). Though a recent lawsuit filed against Harvard University on behalf of Asian-American applicants says legacy preferences “operate to the disadvantage of minority applicants,” the lawsuit’s challenge concerns alleged racial preferences.
A Moral Obligation
Fairness isn’t just a constitutional question for black-robed judges. Lawsuits aside, admissions officials have a moral responsibility to examine the consequences of their legacy preferences, says Liliana M. Garces, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Texas at Austin. “They should think of their legacy policy in way that’s conscious of their diversity goals. It requires a really serious look at how that might be undermining those goals.”
Rick Clark agrees. He regularly studies enrollment data to gauge whether his office’s consideration of legacies is “responsible.” Making sure that legacy and nonlegacy students who enroll are just about equally qualified (as measured by grades and test scores) is one way of doing that. “Without question, it’s valid to challenge the equity of it all,” he says.
Mr. Clark is director of undergraduate admission at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where nearly one-fifth of this fall’s incoming freshmen are legacies. He thinks that proportion is about right. Increasing it too much, he says, would jeopardize the institution’s pursuit of other goals, such as enrolling more low-income students (about one in five incoming students are eligible for Pell Grants). “The important thing is to demonstrate that these two enrollment goals aren’t mutually exclusive,” he says. “There’s room for both.”
These days, plenty of well-qualified applicants aren’t getting in. The overall acceptance rate for this year’s class was 23 percent; for legacies it was 33 percent. The gap, Mr. Clark says, is partly explained by the fact that most legacy applicants hail from Georgia. The institution admits in-state students at a higher rate than out-of-state students.
Recently Georgia Tech’s admissions office sponsored an event for alumni, partly to explain the institution’s increasing selectivity — and why the university is rejecting many more applicants, legacies included, than it once did. That sort of outreach to graduates stands as a reminder: For all the joy the modern admissions office might bring to some alumni parents, it’s delivering disappointment to many others.
In a field that’s often tight-lipped about its operations, Mr. Clark offers a candid rendering of why legacies appeal to colleges. First, there can be tangible benefits, such as higher retention rates — and higher giving rates down the line. “The financial model hinges on having our own alumni constantly connected to this place for the rest of their lives,” he says. “That really is critical for the economic viability of institutions going forward.”
That’s not all, though. Mr. Clark believes legacies, steeped in the traditions of a campus, foster community on the campus, the kind of connections that can help other students succeed. “I can’t put a percentage on it,” he says, “but I know that the legacy element has value.”
Even so, a college could easily get carried away in justifying its consideration of legacies. At institutions that have long embraced that tradition, the prospect of abandoning it might seem as absurd as chopping down all the trees on the quad. Yet somehow institutions that have stopped considering legacies altogether (such as Texas AM University and the University of Georgia) manage to survive, increase selectivity, and raise money for new dorms, libraries, and basketball arenas. Then again, going legacy-blind might hinder some institutions more than others.
If used sparingly, legacy programs just might be a necessary evil, says Nancy Leopold, executive director of CollegeTracks, a Maryland nonprofit group that helps low-income and first-generation students get to college. Although legacy admits are often described as living, breathing barriers to college access, they don’t top Ms. Leopold’s list of concerns about admissions. Many other practices — reliance on standardized test scores, considerations of demonstrated interest — do more to hinder underrepresented applicants, she believes.
“If you got rid of all the legacies, you probably wouldn’t see a significant difference in the number of low-income and first-generation students in highly-selective institutions,” she says. “That only happens when the institution decides it’s a priority.”
Enrollment officials often describe their work as balancing tradeoffs among competing, even contradictory goals. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who view the system from the outside hold conflicting views of what should — and shouldn’t — count in admissions. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) said colleges shouldn’t consider an applicant’s race. Yet they were more evenly divided over legacies. While 52 percent said colleges shouldn’t consider whether an applicant’s parents are alumni, 46 percent said that should be a factor.
Yes, the admissions process is rigged. But there’s no real consensus on exactly how it’s rigged.
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
Homes along the coastline of Hatteras Island in North Carolina sit in darkness as the sun rises on Wednesday. (Logan Cyrus for The Washington Post)
HATTERAS, N.C. — It’s high summer on Hatteras Island, an expanse of sandy beaches and cute towns on the Outer Banks. The skies are a brilliant blue, the ocean immaculately clear. A northeasterly breeze cuts the humidity and gently ruffles the sea grass on the dunes.
These are the days that can make an islander’s year. Local business owners compare the first week of August to Christmas — a season of good cheer, family togetherness and healthy bottom lines. It’s the time for tourists punch-drunk on sunshine and saltwater taffy, for full hotel registers and lines at restaurants and impulse purchases at every seashell trinket shop in town.
But the rentals have been vacant, the restaurants closed. The only soul on the island’s southernmost beach is an elderly fisherman who looks as if he has no need for a conch paperweight.
“Christmas came . . . and we got a big old lump of coal,” says Eddie Skakle, who runs a beach-equipment rental company here.
It has been nearly a week since a construction crew working to upgrade the Bonner Bridge, which connects Hatteras with the rest of the Outer Banks to the north, inadvertently dropped a steel casing on three underwater electric cables running to the island. The accident severed most of the power to Hatteras and cut off tourism completely. To avoid overtaxing backup generators, some 60,000 visitors were evacuated. Workers have been laboring furiously to restore the broken electric connection.
Sheriff’s deputies have been keeping the normal swarm of tens of thousands of tourists at bay, sitting at the northern end of the bridge to stop everyone but this barrier island’s residents from entering. The checkpoint has cut Hatteras — and Avon and Buxton and Ocracoke and Rodanthe — off from the mainland, choking these towns of their summer lifeblood just as the summer heads into its final stretch.
Hatteras Island is in a state of suspended animation.
Shop owners retreat into back offices but leave their “open” signs up, in the off chance someone might stop in. Restaurateurs review food order forms but don’t hit “send.” The sign outside Little Grove United Methodist Church bears the message “Welcome vacationers!” right below the times for Sunday services. Condos are cleaned; hotel-room beds are made. The water is perfect for swimming, but no one’s at the beach — those who live here and depend on this pristine shoreline are all at home, checking Facebook for updates on when the island will reopen.
It might happen as soon as noon Friday, when authorities say they’ll start allowing tourists across the bridge. It can’t happen soon enough. This vacationland is ready. It needs its vacationers back. Badly.
The beach sits empty this week on Hatteras Island as the wait continues for a solution to severed electrical transmission lines. (Logan Cyrus for The Washington Post)
The Outer Banks’ tourism industry is worth more than $1 billion, and it employs the majority of Hatteras Island’s roughly 5,000 permanent residents.
“People work all summer to get through the winter,” says Danny Couch, a real estate agent and tour guide who represents the island on the Dare County Board of Commissioners. Couch estimates that Hatteras businesses have lost as much as $18 million during this week of closures.
Just one customer has rented anything from Skakle’s beach equipment store since Saturday. But he and his wife, Gail, keep their front door open.
The couple spent tens of thousands of dollars over the winter to replace golf carts and bicycles that were destroyed when Hurricane Matthew flooded their shop with 12 inches of storm surge in October. They were depending on a good season to recoup the expense.
Plus, they miss the tourists: the rowdy crowds that pack the shop in the mornings to borrow paddle boards and road bikes. The way they come back at the end of the day, worn out and with weird new tan lines.
“You know in the spring, as we lead up to the season, Gail looks at the windows as we ride down the road to the beach and goes, ‘Oh, are there lights on?’ ” Skakle says. “She can’t wait for the people to come.”
Driving that same road Wednesday, they pass clusters of rental homes with sun-bleached siding and hokey names such as “Sea Whisper.” Not a single one looks inhabited.
Locals say it’s as though January has struck their island in July. Several people describe it as “eerie.”
“I feel like I’m in a young-adult dystopian novel,” says GeeGee Rosell, who runs a bookstore in Buxton, quickly jumping to a “Hunger Games” comparison. “Where’s Jennifer Lawrence?”
Or, for older generations, restaurant owner Jomi Price offers this analogy: “It’s Gilligan’s Island.”
The Burrus Motor Court in Hatteras, N.C., sits empty Wednesday. (Logan Cyrus for The Washington Post)
Price’s seafood grill, Ketch 55 in Avon, has been shuttered all week. After throwing out $4,500 in beef, shrimp, scallops and other food that spoiled when the island initially lost power, Price couldn’t justify staying open.
Power outages after hurricanes have hurt the business before, but those times there’s always work to do, streets to clean, a community to rally. It’s difficult to blame Mother Nature for being Mother Nature. This is a “dry hurricane” — there’s nothing to do.
A friend suggests that Price go to the beach, but she is too anxious to take a break. She fills the time in other ways: Cleaning the kitchen. Biting her nails. She went to the grocery store just for a gallon of milk, knowing there wouldn’t be any lines. The trip still took 2½ hours, because she knew everyone she saw and they all wanted to talk. Every conversation began the same way: “Heard anything?”
All week, no one has been certain how long the island’s isolation would last. The timelines for repairs kept shifting: Two weeks. Six to 10 days. By Wednesday, the Cape Hatteras Electric Cooperative, which has been working on several solutions to the outage, announced that it would move forward with a plan to bypass the broken power cables by building an aboveground transmission line. By Thursday evening, power would be restored and the bridge slated to open just in time for tourists to enter for the start of the next week-long rental period, which begins Saturday.
People have been calling, asking “Can I come?” Jan Dawson, who owns the Cape Hatteras Motel, says she hasn’t been able to give them a definitive yes or no. She’s been worried about another lost weekend. “It’s horrible.”
Instead of vacationers, Hatteras has gotten lawyers. At a community meeting for business owners Wednesday, two teams of lawyers try to persuade locals to sign on to one of three class-action lawsuits that already have been filed. A third group, from the North Carolina attorney general’s office, brings up the possibility of mediating a settlement with PCL, the construction company involved in the bridge work.
The audience asks lots of questions, but no one comes away looking particularly enthusiastic. Most people are reluctant to assign blame for the outage. “It’s an accident,” they say, gently. And most don’t want a lawsuit. They want to know when they should call their customers and submit their food orders. They want the traffic to return. They want the beaches to be full. They want things to go back to the way they’re supposed to be.
The next day, they would get an answer: Full power would be restored and visitors would be admitted for the weekend. But no one feels they can relax just yet.
“I’m just aggressively trying to encourage people to come back,” says Dawson, who would spend Thursday calling up every guest who canceled. “Let them know we’re open, the Island is open for business.”
A sign outside the Hatteras Village Civic Center on Wednesday. (Logan Cyrus for The Washington Post)
This story, originally published at 12:32 p.m., has been updated to reflect the announcement Thursday evening that the Bonner Bridge is scheduled to open to tourists at noon Friday.
