In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision against race-based college admissions, a bipartisan movement against legacy admissions is now gaining traction at the state and federal level.
It’s still not totally clear, however, how ending legacy admissions will impact colleges or alter their often nefarious behavior. In fact, it’s not even clear what the right’s goals are anymore when it comes to tackling radicalism on college campuses. What is clear is that the old way of thinking isn’t working. It’s well past time that conservatives find a new way of thinking about higher education reforms.
In November, Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young and Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine authored bipartisan legislation that would outlaw legacy admission at federal level.
“A student’s acceptance into a college should not hinge on whether their parents attended that school or donated a large sum of money,” Kaine said in the press release.
The Virginia state legislature has adopted a similar bill that would outlaw admissions on the basis of “familial relationship to any donor,” the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. Originally introduced by the state Senate, it unanimously passed in the state House of Representatives on Tuesday.
Legacy admissions refers to the process by which students are given preferential admissions consideration if a parent or other relative attended — and presumably donated — as well. It is a distinctly American phenomenon that does happen at other elite schools around the world. Yet 56 percent of America’s top schools use legacy admissions as a factor in their enrollment process, according to The Wall Street Journal.
So are the latest steps to ban legacy admissions a good or bad thing? At the moment, it appears conservatives don’t quite have a suitable framework to decide.
Traditionally, the knee-jerk answer for conservative Republicans would be to defend legacy admissions on the basis of meritocracy, familial values and the free market. Somewhat paradoxically, at its core, legacy admission is a meritocratic concept. Parents and grandparents worked hard to secure their positions, and they earned the right to pass on those advantages to their children.
That’s because the family is traditionally the most important societal unit for conservatives. If society isn’t organized to protect and promote durable family formation, then what’s the point? We’d all be mere atomistic individuals, wards of the state.
Of course, a critic might argue that conservatives mostly pay lip service to family values, while what they really care about is expanding the free market. But legacy admissions serve that function as well. Multi-generational enrollment not only entrenches a campus community, but ensures cohesive alumni networks, perpetuation of elite status and — perhaps most importantly — massive donations, all of which go into giving the American university system the largest competitive advantage in the world. (RELATED: Donor Who Gave Harvard $300 Million Says He’s ‘Not Interested’ In Funding University, Questions ‘DEI Agenda’)
Billionaire Ken Griffin, who gave Harvard $300 million last year:
“I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”
He asks if Harvard will return to educating young people to be leaders or remain “lost in the wilderness” of DEI. pic.twitter.com/exLdTqHnv8
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 30, 2024
Meanwhile, the liberal Democrat’s impulse is to oppose legacy admissions on egalitarian grounds, which in actuality boils down to class resentment — “It’s unfair that someone else has something I don’t.” The left has been pushing this same message since the French Revolution.
Now, conservatives typically reject the egalitarian argument. It’s dumb and anti-meritocratic, and we should continue to reject it. But our own impulses are in dire need of re-evaluation in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) era. Our Zombie Reaganism is not sufficient to carry us to victory at a time when gay race communists have long since dominated the university system and use it to select for and shape a new American elite consistent with their values and preferences.
Yet a telling op-ed from the Washington Post shows a liberal reevaluation as well: “The great myth: Legacy admissions are the enemy of diversity, institutionalizing privilege at everyone else’s expense. The surprising truth: Legacy admissions do not harm diversity. They enhance it.”
That’s because the “boarding school” girl is not competing against the “factory worker’s son” for the same spot, but against her “equally privileged” peers. The implication, of course, is that colleges have certain quotas to fill for the under-privileged, and legacy admissions maintain the funding and connections that will help those under-privileged students climb the ladder of prosperity.
Yet everyone knows the admissions system is not rigged to help the “factory worker’s son.” Neither does it select meritocratically among the under-privileged, as many of whom are deemed to be so are in fact quite privileged. Rather than examining class or true disadvantage, universities use identity boxes as stand-ins for privilege, a practice that is only likely to become more insidious now that explicit affirmative action has been curtailed. So legacy admissions seems to do little more than reproduce and entrench our already deeply anti-meritocratic system.(RELATED: Latinx Engineers And ‘Systemic Racism’: Government Grants Are Injecting Race Into Science And Tech)
So while the impulsive conservative defense of legacy admissions still holds true, we must seriously ask ourselves: are these still the goals we want to achieve on college campuses? We should not seek to maximally empower colleges as they then immediately turn to leverage their position to attack everything conservatives hold dear, including the traditional meritocracy that legitimizes legacy admissions in the first place. It is time for conservative strategy on higher education reform to depart from the philosophical and instead become tactical to achieve new ends. It’s time to take these colleges down a notch.
It’s beautiful: “The Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has been eliminated.” pic.twitter.com/8FXfKIJzDo
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 30, 2024
Yet it’s still not quite clear if legacy admissions is the right tool to do that. Of course, we want our colleges to remain at the forefront of competitiveness, funding and innovation — we just want them to return to this as their core function rather than serving as an accessory to visions of social utopia. To decide how legacy admissions factor into this goal, we must ask an entirely new set of questions.
Do legacy admissions actually complement and perpetuate the DEI regime, or are they the last bastion of traditionalism standing in the breach of a fully hostile takeover? In other words, we want to predict whether there would be a net gain or loss in meritocratic admissions if legacy admissions were eradicated. If eliminating them would be a boon to meritocratic admissions, then can the process be phased out without hurting American universities’ competitive advantage at serving their core functions?
These are not easy questions to answer, so it’s a good thing that our lawmakers have the Congressional Research Service at their disposal.
Perhaps it is time for a blank slate. We might be so far gone that the only solution is to jump start meritocracy anew. But conservative Republicans no longer have the luxury of policy pontification. They must first adopt the right questions before they can even dream of finding the right answers.