Friday, February 14, 2003

College-Entrance Preferences for the Well Connected Draw Ire
Now that critics of affirmative action have persuaded the Supreme Court to consider whether black and Hispanic applicants are taking the rightful spots of more-qualified whites, some supporters of race-conscious admissions are mounting a counteroffensive. They complain that it is the preferential treatment afforded some applicants because of their parents' wealth or college affiliation that is unfair.

At Middlebury and other highly selective colleges, the chance that the children of alumni will be admitted is often double that of applicants without such connections, though frequently not as great as the admission rate of underrepresented minorities and even some athletes.

The lament of the excluded, long expressed by unsuccessful applicants to Harvard and Yale, has crept into the early presidential campaign. In a speech not long ago at the University of Maryland, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, apparently seeking to enhance egalitarian credentials in his pursuit of the Democratic nomination, criticized the preferences given children of alumni.

"Affirmative action remedies past discrimination," Senator Edwards, a graduate of North Carolina State whose parents did not attend college, said in an interview. "Legacy admissions give more to kids who already have more."

Unlike affirmative action, the preferences for children of alumni have rarely been tested in the courts. But since the overwhelming number of beneficiaries of such policies are white, some scholars say that legal challenges are inevitable.

"Even if it's a private institution, a college is a nonprofit organization subject to civil rights law," said Michael Lind, a former lecturer at Harvard Law School who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a centrist public policy institute. "Legacies are a relic of white supremacy and Northeastern establishment dominance."

In response to legal challenges to affirmative action, the public university systems of Georgia and California have dropped preferences in recent years for legacies and other so-called V.I.P. applicants. But no highly selective private college has followed suit, in large part because the economic benefit of admitting such applicants is so great.

Middlebury, like other colleges, does occasionally disappoint its big donors. A few years ago, an alumnus who was negotiating a six-figure donation to Middlebury decided to hold off until the admissions committee had ruled on his child's application. When the committee said no, citing low test scores and grades, the prospective donor walked away, Dean Schoenfeld said.

"Our philanthropy follows our children," Dean Schoenfeld quoted the benefactor as saying, "and our children aren't going to Middlebury."

Nonetheless, the admission rate of legacies, even those whose parents rarely donate to the college, far exceeds that of applicants as a whole. At Middlebury, the admission rate of legacies in the class of 2006 was 45 percent, compared with 27 percent for the entire class. At Harvard, legacies who applied for the current freshman class were admitted at nearly four times the rate of students over all (39 percent, versus 11 percent). At Stanford, where nearly 10 percent of students in the freshman class are legacies, their admission rate (about 25 percent ) was double that of the class as a whole (12.7 percent).

Siblings, too, of current and past students often receive favored treatment. But at many selective colleges, athletes receive the greatest boost of all, while accounting for some of the lowest-rated transcripts.

To those who argue that the children of the connected receive an unfair advantage, Mr. McCardell, who has been president of Middlebury since 1992, argues that the admissions process entails "imperfect human beings' exercising their imperfect judgment in rationing a scarce commodity."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/13/education/13LEGA.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

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