The traditional financial argument for legacy admissions rests on the idea that favoring legacies affects the propensity of graduates to give back. I don't mean this in a corrupt quid pro quo sense. Private universities are dynastic enterprises that rely on gifts in order to continue offering a general subsidy to current students. People often don't realize that even Stanford spends much more per student than its full-paying "customers" pay in tuition.
It's awfully hard to construct an empirical test of this plausible behavioral argument, but private universities have believed in it for generations.
At this point, however, the wealthiest places can begin to move away from legacy admissions, and for two reasons. First, the number of cases where the legacy wouldn't have gotten in is probably small enough that they can eliminate any explicit admissions bump. And secondly, the pressures to improve social mobility are making legacy preference increasingly costly in the PR game.
I suspect one of the positive outcomes of the Bloomberg gift is Hopkins' move away from legacy preference.
At W&M, we have a "Board of Visitors" (governor-appointed) policy that stipulates favoring legacies, but in practice the admissions office limits this (so they say) to "tie goes to the legacy." My counterargument to them is simple: if that's the entire legacy bounce, then it's time to get the Board to rescind the preference because it ain't doing much and it's hurting our larger reputation. The problem, of course, is that the Board isn't inclined in that direction and most presidents don't want to expend political capital on pushing something that doesn't expand our resource base.
Posts: 12533 | Location: Williamsburg, VA | Registered: 19 July 2005
