Must Higher Education Always Genuflect Before America’s Highest Incomes?

Sam Pizzigati

 October 8, 2024
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Photo by Nathan Dumlao

America’s wealthiest have towered over the rest of us for quite some time now, and most all of us have over recent decades gained at least a little sense of how awesome the purchasing power of our richest has become. Today’s awesomely affluent, we’ve come to understand, can afford to buy just about anything, from ever more exotic destination weddings to islands and elections.

The list of wonders that only our mega-rich can afford has of late been expanding almost as fast as the size of their personal fortunes. The deepest of our deep pockets, to give just one example, can now explore the ocean depths in fully customized personal submersibles that run a mere $35 million. And our awesomely affluent can ride these submersibles straight into their own personalized “floating cities.” A cozy one might only set them back a couple hundred million.

But the richest among us aren’t devoting their “disposable” wealth just to fun and frolic. They also have their eyes firmly fixed on much more consequential missions — like ensuring their offspring a launching pad for a prestigious future. And in our modern world that future comes most readily to those who hold a diploma from one of America’s most eminent colleges and universities.

The simple cost of attending a top-ranked university — now nearing about $500,000 over four years — has, of course, never posed any sort of problem for our wealthiest families. What has been a concern for our richest: making sure that their offspring can gain admittance onto the world’s most highly selective campuses.

The “cure” to that uncertainty? That antidote has been, ever since the 1920s, “legacy admissions,” a welcome card that elite universities offer our nation’s most affluent, especially those affluents who’ve happened to bestow upon their alma maters serious chunks of their fortunes.

This “practice of passing an admissions advantage along the bloodlines of the nation’s richest families” remains “unfair and gross, and just about everybody knows it,” notes James Murphy, the postsecondary policy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Education Reform Now think tank.

“Our country was founded on the principles that opportunity should be open to all, not just those who inherit it from their parents,” adds Murphy, “and that merit should determine success, not lineage.”

But noble sentiments like these have long taken a distinct backseat at elite universities. How wide a backseat? Associated Press journalists at one recent point tried to find out. They asked 30 of America’s most selective colleges how many legacy students they enroll. Only eight responded.

Out of Harvard, one of the nonrespondents, some revealing data did eventually emerge, but only after a lawsuit revealed that the university’s acceptance rate for applicants from legacy families averaged 34 percent between 2014 and 2019, over five times the 6 percent acceptance rate for applicants without legacy status.

Overall, as one new national advocacy group for equitable admissions has been highlighting, the dozen universities that make up the “Ivy-plus colleges” have more students coming from America’s most affluent 1 percent than our entire bottom 50 percent. These 12 institutions of higher learning currently hold, the new Class Action group adds, over a quarter-trillion dollars in their endowments.

Have legacy admissions essentially become too baked in to effectively challenge? Maybe not. A controversial Supreme Court ruling last year — in a case that involved Harvard and the University of North Carolina — has unintentionally given new life to the drive against legacy welcomes.

In that case, the high court ruled that colleges and universities must no longer take race into consideration in admission decisions. But how could the court, as one Princeton student has pointed out, strike down race-based affirmative action while leaving in place “forms of affirmative action that favor the historically privileged,” most notably the legacy admissions “crafted to exclude minorities — first on the basis of religion, then on the basis of race.”

Education equality activists have seized on that contradiction. The Supreme Court’s move to gut affirmative action on race, as Politico reports, has “supercharged efforts to outlaw legacy admissions at universities.”

This past March, Virginia banned legacy admissions in the state’s public colleges and universities. Illinois soon afterwards ended legacy and donor preferences in its public higher education system. Maryland would go a step further. The state earlier this year become the first in the nation to ban legacy preferences at both public andprivate universities. California last month followed suit.

At the federal level, President Biden has blasted legacy admissions as practices that expand “privilege instead of opportunity,” and members of Congress have introducedlegislation that would ban the privileges that legacy admissions provide.

But the legacy bans enacted so far, the Education Reform Now analyst James Murphy fears, all share a clear flaw. These bans do not thoroughly enough define the admission practices that would rate as illegal. Murphy is pushing for legislation that would be far more specific.

To be effective, Murphy notes as an example, a ban on legacy admissions should have language that prevents universities from including in documents used to consider applicants “any information that discloses the name of a college or university that any relative of the applicant attended.”

Reforms along that direction can certainly limit the wiggle room elite universities have to give admission preferences to students from wealthy families. But application reforms can only take us so far. They cannot offset the wide array of imposing advantages our wealthiest can give their young.

Say, for instance, that the admission decisions that elite universities make suddenly became totally “merit”-based. The rich would still be free to line up for their children the best tutors and educational experiences that money could buy. Those tutors and experiences would give their children a much better shot at academic — and life — success than the children of families without grand fortunes.

So where does that leave us? Moves to reform the college admissions process still make eminent sense. But we can’t kid ourselves. We can only truly level that admissions process by taking serious steps to level how we distribute our nation’s income and wealth.

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press).