Consider This from NPR - Affirmative Action — For The Rich

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

The Supreme Court may have ended race-conscious admissions in higher education. But the end of affirmative action seems to have added fuel to another contentious debate around college admissions policies. For decades, many elite, private institutions have given prospective college students preference if a relative attended the school or, in some cases, when a major donor was involved. While the practice of affirmative action is dead, legacy admissions continue. But more and more critics of the practice are calling on schools to do away with them, including President Biden. Host Juana Summers speaks with economist John Friedman, a professor and chair of economics at Brown University. He co-authored a study that quantifies the lasting socio-economic disparities between legacy students and their less affluent peers.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. The Supreme Court may have effectively killed race-conscious admissions in higher education, but the end of affirmative action seems to have fueled another sharp debate around college admissions policies. What its critics call a different form of affirmative action is now being challenged at Harvard University. Feds have opened an investigation into Harvard's policy on legacy admissions. For decades, many elite private institutions have given prospective college students preferential treatment if a relative had attended the school or, in some cases, where a major donor was involved. But with the end of affirmative action, critics of legacy admissions practices have become even more vocal in calling for schools to do away with them,

including President Biden. The Department of Education has launched a civil rights investigation into Harvard University's legacy admissions practices. Harvard's discriminatory practice of using donor and legacy preferences in admissions overwhelmingly benefit white applicants and harm applicants of color. Oren Selstrom is the litigation director of the Boston-based nonprofit Lawyers for Civil Rights. Earlier this month, the group filed a complaint with the Department of Education that alleged Harvard's practices violate the Civil Rights Act. Simply put, Harvard is on the wrong side of history. Momentum is growing. As more and more colleges and universities abandon these unfair preferences, those that cling to them will increasingly be seen as outliers.

Last week, Wesleyan University in Connecticut added itself to the list of schools that no longer are using legacy admissions. University President Michael Roth spoke to NPR about the decision. In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision, it became clear to me that any advantage you give to incumbents, to people who already have advantages, is a glaring sign of unfairness. And we want to recruit a very diverse student body. And I want to send this signal to everybody that Wesleyan is committed to doing that. But Roth concedes that creating a more diverse student body will take work. We have to be very aggressive in recruiting students from places that haven't typically looked at schools like Wesleyan. The history of this country leads some communities to think those places are not for me. It's not just about history. For many communities of color, that perception remains. Consider this.

About 40 percent of private colleges use the practice of legacy admissions. We'll dig deeper into what those statistics tell us about the reality of social disparities between the affluent and everyone else. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Thursday, July 27th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Affirmative action based on race might be over, but what about for the rich?

A recent study argues that legacy admissions practices are essentially that. John Friedman, a professor of economics at Brown University, is a co-author of the study. And I started by asking him to define legacy admissions. Many of these schools have somewhat public admissions policies where they offer favored admissions preferences for students who are children of alumni. And of course, when your parents already went to one of these schools, what that leads to is students who are already coming from relatively advantaged backgrounds further benefiting in the admissions process relative to students who are coming from much more modest backgrounds. And part of what we find in the study is this accounts for a meaningful share of this overall fact that students from high-income families are

overrepresented at these institutions, even relative to what you would expect just based on who's getting very high test scores or other academic credentials across the country. Hoping if you can, you can summarize briefly for us the kind of big headlines coming out of this survey. What did you and your colleagues find? So I think there are two big headlines that come out of the study. So the first is what we've been talking about, where students from high-income families see a substantial admissions advantage when they apply to one of these schools. Legacy preferences that we've talked about are an

important part of it. And then the other two contributing factors that we find in the study are the preference for recruited athletes, which actually disproportionately come from high-income families at these schools, and a preference in admissions for students who are outstanding on various non-academic credentials. Think of this as evaluations of extracurricular activities or personality. It might be informed by a guidance counselor rating. These are all factors which seem to be particularly concentrated among high-income students. So that's the first thing, is that these students are getting into these schools at much higher rates. But the second finding I think is also really important. We take a step back and ask, well, why does it matter? And what we show is that when students who are, you know, think about comparing

two students who are really totally identical, except that one ends up attending an Ivy Plus institution and the other attends, you know, say one of the best public schools in the country, attending an Ivy Plus school is really transformational for the post-school trajectory of those students. We see that they're 60% more likely to get into the top 1% of the income distribution when we look in their early 30s, but there are even larger effects on what we more broadly think of as access to leadership positions in society. These students are twice as likely to attend some of the most elite graduate schools in the country, and they're three times more likely to be working at a job that we classify as a prestigious firm. So think

of these as not only some of the most prestigious, say, law and consulting firms in the country, but research hospitals, non-profits, universities, really kind of all across the occupational spectrum. These are the students that are disproportionately being put into leadership positions. And so I think that's why who's going to get admitted to these schools, who's attending these schools is so important, because there's such a pipeline from these schools to these positions of influence in society. Yeah, and I want to get into that. I mean, we should just point out here that it's really a

tiny fraction of Americans who attend the types of schools that we're largely discussing here. But as you were pointing out, if you look at what people who attend these elite schools go on to do, they can, as you and your colleagues point out, really operate as gateways to the elite echelons of American life, which raises another big question for me. Historically, what is the impact of legacy admissions been in this country around who has access to power and wealth? Well, that's, I think, exactly why legacy preferences and admissions and other preferences and admissions are so important. It's because it's controlling who's getting access to these really wide pipelines into political positions, other positions of wealth, positions of influence. And that's why, even though these are only 12 schools, there are not that many students from the big picture at

these schools, less than half a percent of the American population in any given year, birth year, attends these schools. These schools have an incredibly important influence on who's in these positions, who's making decisions that affect potentially millions of people, who's standing as a role model, an example of people in these influential positions. And so I think that just makes it more important to think about the diversity of the students who are at these schools to begin with? The recent Supreme Court decision that focused on race-conscious affirmative action has really broken this out into a national debate that has led to schools like Westland and Connecticut, Amherst College in Massachusetts, Johns Hopkins in Maryland, ending those legacy admissions practices. I guess I'm curious whether

you think that can have a significant impact on leveling the playing field. What else these institutions could or should be doing to that end? So I think the most important impact of the Supreme Court decision, of course, beyond the direct influence on the racial diversity of student bodies, is that it's causing these schools to reconsider more broadly everything that they're doing in admissions. Sometimes it can be hard to make smaller changes because people will say, look, we have a system, it's working, changing is hard, but everybody's now going to be forced to change. And so I think there's a particular moment of fluidity where there are a lot of options on the table that might not have been considered as options in a more normal course of business.

And so I think schools are considering a wide range of new types of admissions policies. They're considering a new focus, a larger focus on socioeconomic diversity. They're thinking about various ways to potentially re-evaluate students more in the context of, say, the neighborhood or the schools that they grew up in. They're thinking about ways to increase the pipeline of students that are applying and who might be interested in coming. Really kind of an all-of-the-above approach in order to make sure, first, of course, for racial diversity, but I think really more generally that they're getting an appropriately diverse group of students in each incoming class. John Friedman is a professor of economics at Brown University. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.

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