In Defense of Legacy

The recent college admissions scandal has brought attention to various ways that applicants get preferential treatment. In the scam, wealthy parents paid huge sums to circumvent normal admissions procedures in order to get their children admitted to select universities. They paid to have sports experience faked and SAT answers changed or even to have someone smarter take the tests.

Students who played fairly and were denied admissions were not the only ones affected by this. The negative fallout from the scandal has also cast a shadow over students who were accepted following the rules but now have folks wondering about them. Several subsequent opinion pieces criticized legal ways to get preferential treatment, particularly legacy admissions.

For some, “legacy” seems to have become a four-letter word. They see it as a way to stack the deck and to prime parents for big donations. They wonder why schools have legacy programs to begin with. In fact, it’s not about elitism; non-elite schools have legacy programs, too. The answer is as simple as family unity, “team” loyalty and chest-thumping, button-bursting pride.

My alma mater, Brown University, is one of the schools known for its legacy admissions. I wasn’t one of them and I’m happy to report that Brown was not one of the schools involved in the scandal. I’ve been active in their fundraising and I have some knowledge about how things work there. I’m speaking out in defense of Brown’s legacy program and legacy admissions in general.

The percentage of Brown legacies that get admitted is not as high as many might expect. Unofficially, Bruno accepts them at roughly three times the rate of non-legacies. Unqualified legacies are not admitted. Moreover, not all legacies come from wealthy families. I know several parents who were so angry because of this that they disengaged from Brown completely. On the flip side, I’ve seen alumni families on campus taking multi-generational photos. Their joy was palpable.

My high school had something called Girls’ Sports Night, with two teams, one for each school color. If you had an older sister, you could choose to be on the same color team as she had been. Others were assigned to a color randomly, by lot. The option was a form of legacy favoritism. I, along with many of my classmates, took advantage of this. It helped promote sibling unity, avoiding rivalry. It also kept parents from having to cheer for two teams, or no team.

Legacy college admissions can promote family unity. Consider the news features about professional football brothers (or coaches) on opposing teams. Their family members sit on a different sideline when the teams meet. Or maybe they move from one side of the field to the other at half time. Without legacy programs, the same would be true of hundreds of parents of college athletes around the country.

Earlier I said that legacy is also about pride. Think about how many people have Junior after their name. Or II or III. Why does a father want his son to carry his same name, and his grandson and so on? It’s because of pride in what that family name signifies, the generations of accomplishments. It’s also the expectation to have Junior carry on traditions. Similarly, Jewish parents often name their babies after deceased relatives. It provides continuity. It’s a way to honor those who have passed and preserve their memory. This custom is also a form of legacy, and a touching one, at that.

Legacy is not a dirty word. Neither are pride or loyalty or unity. Scam and fraud, on the other hand, are. Don’t debase legacy admissions by equating them with the unfair practices exposed in the recent college scandal. Those scams were perpetrated in the shadows. Don’t elevate them by conflating them with legacy programs that have openly promoted family unity for generations.

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