The New Yorker Radio Hour - Will the End of Affirmative Action Lead to the End of Legacy Admissions?

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

The practice of legacy admissions—preferential consideration of the children of alumni—has emerged as a national flash point since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in June. Even some prominent Republicans are joining the Biden Administration in calling for its end. David Remnick speaks with the U.S. Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, about the politics behind college admissions. Cardona sees legacy preference as part of a pattern that discourages many students from applying to selective schools, but notes that it is not the whole problem. How can access to higher education, he asks, be more equitable when the quality of K-12 education is so inequitable?    Plus, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, looks at the problems facing admissions officers now that race cannot be a consideration in maintaining diversity. Gersen has been reporting for The New Yorker on the legal fight over affirmative action and the movement to end legacy admissions. She speaks with the dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, one of the schools that voluntarily announced an end to legacy preference after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action. “So far, the responses have been overwhelmingly positive,” Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez tells her. “But we’re obviously some time removed from the results of the decision. . . . I think it’s both symbolic and potentially substantive in terms of signalling our value to not have individually unearned benefits.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 1935, the young John F. Kennedy sent his college essay to the admissions department at Harvard. And here it is in full. The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I've always wanted to go there as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then, too, I would like to go to the same college as my father.

To be a Harvard man is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain. That was it. That was the whole essay. And if ever there was an example of the presumptions of privilege, to say nothing of weak writing, well, there it is. and by the way, he wrote almost the exact same essay for his application to Princeton. Kennedy, of course, graduated from Harvard, as did his father,

who was at that time one of the richest men in the United States. But maybe times are changing. Harvard is now the target of a lawsuit on legacy admissions, which, of course, favors the children of graduates, graduates who, almost inevitably, are in the upper income brackets. Congressional Democrats and even some prominent Republicans as well as the Biden administration have also come out against legacy admissions. Suddenly, it's a big issue.

Today, I'm directing the Department of Education to analyze what practices help build a more inclusive and diverse student bodies and what practices hold that back. Practice like legacy admissions and other systems. Jeff Merkley and Congressman Jamal Bowman, both Democrats, Introduced a bill yesterday that would ban legacy admissions. Congressman Bowman argued all students deserve a fair shot in getting into college. I'm joined now by Miguel Cardona, the Secretary of Education.

Cardona began his career as an elementary school teacher, then a principal, and he was the commissioner of education for the state of Connecticut before his appointment to the cabinet. Mr. Secretary, legacy admissions have been around for an awfully long time, And why now? Why is this the moment for the Biden administration of all administrations to make a move on legacy admissions? Well, what we're doing is not necessarily making a move on legacy admissions, what we're doing is revisiting college admissions in general, under which legacy admissions is one of those. I think we have an opportunity as a country in light of what I think to be a very wrong decision by the Supreme Court ending affirmative action to reevaluate.

how we're communicating to our students on their ability to find success in higher education. I think we have to recommit to making sure we're opening more pathways to students. In particular, students who have historically been underrepresented, even with affirmative action, we had work to do to make sure that the diversity on our campus reflects the diversity of our country. So I think it's the time now for leaders in higher education to really put their heads together and chase the ideal. Now, admissions directors at places like Harvard and Yale and Princeton

and all those places have said they're going to be hurt very badly in their diversity efforts because of the end of affirmative action as dictated by the Supreme Court. Now you've launched an investigation of Harvard admissions. What do you expect to find? What do you expect to find as the present tense situation and how will it be affected by the Supreme Court decision and how will getting rid of legacy admissions affect the picture?

What's the present tense and what's the ideal you're headed toward? There was a request for an investigation out of the office for civil rights stating that legacy admissions was unfair. I can't speak specifically to an investigation. But to your earlier point, a lot of university presidents are lamenting the Supreme Court decision because it's going to make their job harder. Very soon we're going to release the initial guidance that interprets, you know, from our legal team here, what the Supreme Court is saying and what it's not saying. The last thing we need is extrapolation here or people to add on to the limitations that colleges can use to get admission into their schools.

The second thing we're going to do, which we actually did last week, is we're going to bring together the leaders from all. all parts of the country, to brainstorm together on best practices and lawful strategy that can use to increase diversity. And then we're going to also publish that. The head of admissions at Yale University is typical in pushing back against the effort to get rid of legacy admissions. And he says the process for selecting students for admissions, together with the process for selecting faculty and deciding what courses to offer, defines a campus community

and culture. And what he's saying on the surface, at least, that we don't want our private university to be intruded on by the government. What's really behind this, in your view? And is Yale, what is Yale trying to preserve by trying to fend off this effort against legacy admissions?

Well, look, I very much respect university's ability to think independently. And I, as I said earlier, I can't, you know, in one decision or one edict, stop all legacy admissions. That's not how it works. We know that in California, when they passed a proposition, blocking affirmative action, the enrollment of black and brown students dropped. And they worked really hard to try to get those numbers up.

What I can tell you is by many college presidents themselves, they want to revisit legacy admissions because they say if, you know, race can't be considered, then your last name shouldn't be the deciding factor either. And I think there's merit to that thinking. But I also think we shouldn't stop there. I think we need to start thinking more broadly about how we're making sure the pathway to higher education is more accessible. I've seen too many students in my experience as a K-12 administrator. Too many students rule out college by sixth, seventh grade because they felt that the admission process and the cost of college was prohibitive. Now, some Republicans, including Tim Scott, who's running for president, have agreed that

legacy admissions are really a problem. Do you think the Republican Party as a whole is as serious about reform on this issue as the Biden administration and other Democrats in Congress? You know, it's really difficult for me to get in the head of the folks who are running for office or what their motivations are. I can't speak to his rationale, but what I can tell you is my experience as Secretary of Education, even on issues that are very bipartisan at the ground level, like career pathways, providing some support to those who are struggling to make ends me, we've gotten nothing but opposition, we've gotten nothing but lawsuits, to the point where the hypocrisy is so blatant. We have folks who are blocking or,

complaining about their own constituents getting $10,000 in debt relief when they're struggling to get back on their feet after the pandemic, yet they're receiving and they're welcoming over a million dollars in debt relief themselves. You know, I'd love to think that there are some issues that we can't come together and really just focus on what our students need, what our families have been asking for. So I'm hopeful, but I'm not optimistic given the track record of lawsuits. I wonder if you think, as I sometimes do, that we spend so much time thinking about college admissions

as the crucial thing here, when in fact maybe the problem is lower down in terms of age. I live in liberal New York City, and it seems to me, and it can be argued that in New York City, as liberal as it is, as liberal mind that it poses to be, may have one of the most segregated school systems in the country.

And I don't think that just goes for New York City. How does that end? That seems infinitely more complicated. This is an area of passion for me. Yesterday I was on an airplane and I was talking to someone who was a local board member in a district. I won't mention the district

because I didn't tell him I was going to be mentioning him on a national interview. But he was a local board member who was telling me that he was having a time in his district because the local zoning ordinances prevented mixed income housing. And that was their way of making sure that only folks that had an income of a certain amount came into those communities. Schools are segregated because communities are segregated.

Schools are only a reflection of the community in which they're embedded. So if you have, and I appreciate efforts to create diverse learning environment. K-12, but oftentimes what ends up happening is we put black and brown kids on buses for 45 minutes, bring them into another community where they're not, they don't live in that community, they don't have after-school programs in those communities. That's not their home. They're not playing in the parks with those kids in those neighborhoods because they've got to get back on a bus and go back to the community.

So we're creating diverse learning environments artificially through our schools instead of having diverse communities. Let me ask if you think that the decline and influence of the SAT, is a good thing or a bad thing in this effort to try to level a playing field? You know, if everyone had the same access to SAT coaches and everyone had access to the same coursework that led up to preparation for the SATs,

I wouldn't have, it would be an easier way to answer. But I think you can't, we can agree that it's going to be impossible. Exactly. So my point is. legislate a complete equality in America. My point that I was going to get to was there are some inherent bias in those data. Now, it's good to have an understanding of how what the students have mastered or what their functioning is.

But that's more a product of the ability for the districts that they came from to prepare them. And we're dealing with students who have had substitute teachers for a majority of their experience because of underfunding. in K-12 education, don't hinge everything on the SATs. So there has to be support at the K-12 level, and that's what we're fighting for with our raise-the-bar plan. We're pushing for literacy and numeracy. We're pushing for better pathways to higher education for our students. We need to raise the bar, not lower expectations.

But also college completion. And I just said last week we announced $45 million for college completion grants to help those students get the academic support that they need to finish college, because we know. college graduates will earn on average a million dollars more than students who just graduate high school. And that's our goal to open up higher education to more students. You know, I know that you're devoted to increasing diversity around the country. Texas has a system of accepting the top 10% of seniors from every high school to the University of Texas. Do you think something like that would yield a more diverse pool in other universities around the country?

Yeah. You know, I think that's a great way of keeping your higher performing students from high school in your state. It makes a lot of sense. But on the flip side, I'll also say we have to be cautious because not all high schools are built the same. Not all K-12 systems are built the same. As a matter of fact, the achievement disparities that we have in schools that serve predominantly black and brown students is glaring. And sadly, as a country, we've normalized it. We've normalized the fact that, black and brown students on average for the last 25 years have been performing 30 points less. So does that mean that we're, again, perpetuating an inequity that unless we have our K-12 systems producing outcomes that are equivalent, we should be careful not to discount students who are underperforming or students who are not getting the interventions or supports that they need and maybe are not as high-performing, not because they don't have the capacity, but because the school system doesn't have the support to provide them.

Mr. Secretary, there's no perfect analogy with any other country, but when you look around the world and the educational and social systems that are available to study for comparison, who gets it more right than this country? You know, I recently had an international conference of education ministers from all over the world. And, you know, some of the conversations is they look at education as an investment in their country. So what does that translate to?

Investing in a highly qualified workforce, whether that's educators, leaders, they invest in their development. The stronger the workforce is, the better product you can provide the students. In other words, you're talking about teacher salaries. professor salaries, teacher salaries. If we've normalized in this country that teachers drive Uber on the weekends to make ends meet, we failed. And is that the reason our test scores are sinking? Look, all the research says, if you have a highly qualified teacher in the classroom, that's the biggest influence within the building that you could have on student achievement. Second only to parents.

So when you invest in your educators, when you focus on hands-on learning where students are, learning by doing. And when you make connections to higher education where you're not in a lifetime of debt, that's how you lift education. And that's how you lift the country. Not everything requires a four-year degree. So if we invest in career and technical education and pathways to some of these careers that are coming that are, you know, you'll start off making $85, $90,000 a year without a four-year degree. And then you can continue to go on to your education and now have a salary that helps pay for it. You know, not only will we fill those positions that are going to become available, millions with the work in the last two and a half years with the Biden Harris team,

that's what we're working on, fixing a broken system and helping students graduate with options. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much. Good talking to you. Take care. Miguel Cardona is the U.S. Secretary of Education. We'll continue looking at the ripple effects of the end of affirmative action and the question of legacy preferences. in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

We're talking today about higher education, specifically who gets into selective colleges and how they get in. Since the Supreme Court banned the consideration of race and admissions in June, a few schools voluntarily stop considering another factor, legacy status. That is, some form of preference

given to children of alumni or employees. One of the first to end legacy admissions in selecting its next class was Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts school in Connecticut. The dean of admissions there is Amin Abdul Malik Gonzalez. You know, I'm an alum. I'm a person of color. I came to Wesan as a first generation low-income student and have actually four children, two of whom are, you know, one to college or through college already, one in college and two more to go.

So this is obviously very close to home for me, both personally and professionally. And I fully support it because I want for my children and for others to have complete ownership of their experience to know that they're there because they deserve to be there, not simply through association. Admissions officers like Gonzalez

who have to select the next group of students under very different circumstances now have a complicated problem on their hands. Gonzalez talked the other day with the New Yorker's Jeannie Sook Gerson, a law professor at Harvard, who's reported on the administration. process. What about the purported benefits of legacy admissions? I think schools have talked about the way that a multi-generational representation in a student body could add to a sense of community

and loyalty to the institution, and then it could translate into financial donations and investment in the institution. Is there any nervousness that you might have or the school might have about that aspect kind of eroding? Yeah, I mean, so far the responses have been, you know, overwhelmingly positive. And I know President Roth is confident that he'll be able to raise money on the strength of our living, our values, and being consistent. But we haven't, you know, we're obviously sometime removed away from the results of the decision in that way.

Are you of the view that legacy admissions did have a disparate racial impact? at Wesleyan or elsewhere? I think it'd be hard to argue that it didn't, just given demographics, you're talking about in some cases centuries of access and opportunity for white Americans, right, who had access to selective admission and not much more than, you know, the last 50 years or so in some places like Wesleyan and a couple of others, that were very intentional about diversifying their student bodies. Legacy admissions, as you said, is one

factor among many that would have previously been considered, and now you've got the Supreme Court saying you can't use race as a factor. So is legacy admissions and putting an end to that part of a solution that you envision for bringing more diversity than might be possible after the Supreme Court's decision? Is it one step in a multitude of moves that you might be considered? Yes, absolutely. I think it's both symbolic and potentially substantive in terms of signaling, you know, our value to not have unearned, individually unearned benefits, not the parents, but the students themselves simply through association. We will certainly still have a number of alumni children and legacies in the class, but it won't be, as I said earlier, as if we have any set aside spaces

or automatic, you know, benefits or quotas, you know, assigned to them. Mm-hmm. So what else are you planning to do other than end legacy admissions in order to address the fact that race can no longer be used as a factor in admission? Sure. So, you know, we're not more than a month, just about a month removed from the decision. We've been anticipating this, you know, reality or possibility for some time. We gathered a task force, made sure to discuss and share with our community, share with faculty, staff, students, you know, have communications in place to be prepared to signal. and then also to back up our messaging with clear concrete evidence of our commitment. And now we're going to scaffold out the other things that President Roth announced in that statement, you know, outreach to community-based organizations, transfer to veterans, you know, our international commitment to the African Scholars program.

So all of those things were material signals and commitments that we're going to continue to work toward this year and beyond. For us, it's never been reduced to race and ethnicity. It's been political thought, background, faith, intellectual, of all dimensions. And so we'll continue to recruit in those ways that give us the best opportunity to build the classes in the community that we're committed to. So recruitment of minority students is one method that you're emphasizing. Is there anything else within the admissions process that can be done to increase, the representation of underrepresented students. Sure.

And this issue has gained quite a bit of attention, as you're likely aware. You know, in the immediate sort of aftermath of the decision, there were announcement of, you know, supplemental essays and ways in which, you know, offices and admission institutions were going to try to suss out important information that would allow them to select diverse groups. We have not had a supplement as part of our process for several years and decided. deliberately not to introduce another supplemental essay because we feel that within the realm of the three applications that we consider, there are essay topics that give students the ability to tell their story in their own words and to highlight the kinds of things that the court allowed for, you know, skills, talents, characteristics consistent with mission. So we didn't need to create yet another, you know, not barrier, but create another expectation, if you will,

that if you multiply that by the number of school students, applying to, that can be a potential barrier. If I'm applying to 10 institutions and each of them have their own supplement, you know, that is going to be time-consuming. It's going to require thought and some bandwidth. So we made the decision not to do that. We're thinking along other lines about, you know, messaging and engagement. And we'll have to see how teachers and counselors understood and understand the decision and how they follow up with the recommendations. that they write and how they advocate for and support students in the process. That's going to be important. So you talked about different types of messaging. Can you give some examples of the

kind of messaging? Sure. I mean, I think to begin with, it's the idea that, you know, we value while we cannot consider race in selection, we value racial and ethnic diversity. And we should not have to compromise on that value. You know, one of the concerns in the immediacy of the aftermath was that institutions would pull back, would retreat out of fear of litigation or other concerns and sort of compromise on their own values and say, you know, we're going to go race neutral across all dimensions, right? Rather than stand up and say, we recognize that there are educational inequities and some of those are tied to race and experience and we can create space and opportunity for students in ways that comply with the law, but that are also consistent with

our values. So speaking of complying with the law, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, some people, including a lot of conservatives, were saying the Chief Justice Roberts' paragraph about how you can consider essays and experience just created a giant loophole in which admissions officers will continue to just do what they were doing and just do it in the form of reading people's essays and just consider race that way. What do you think? think about that. So it's an interesting question in part because, you know, what it relies upon is the assumption, I would say, that all students are going to choose to share this particular element of their identity, right? You can consider race if it comes in the essay if that's something

that a student chooses to share. We don't want students to be forced into corners where they feel they have to write about their racial identity. If that is central to their existence, of course, or part of their reality. But if a student wants to write about their passion for computer science or for dance or for something else, for family, they should not feel that the only way to have that element of their diverse background registered

is to be reduced to a single part of the application. From the vantage point of an admissions officer, do you think there is a real difference between looking at an essay and just gleaning from it, this person is a member of an underrepresented racial minority like this person is Asian, this person is black, versus looking at an essay and saying this person has had an experience of being black that shows certain characteristics like resilience and, you know, persistence and things like that.

Do you think there's a real difference between those two things? I think there are differences across all kinds of dimensions because admission is more art than science. What I was alluding to earlier was the fact that, while status could be recognized in terms of a student's background with an Asian American, Caucasian, African American, yes, that affiliation or status would be recognized. But the understanding of that student's background experience and potential is framed through their environment, through their, you know, secondary school experience, their personal circumstances, their background. So it's not simply based on that affiliation alone that checks the box and sort of gets and tips the scale in that way. A student who's not otherwise qualified wouldn't be admitted simply because they check the box, right?

But understanding that there might be things that impact, access, opportunities, things of that sort that are related that are related to their race, ethnicity, and community. Like, those things are contextual considerations that we take, you know, pains to try to make sure that we better understand and can appropriately consider students in those environments. Are there any other universities or colleges or institutions that you consider to be models or schools that had gotten it right somehow or any institutions that you've learned from in kind of redesigning your admissions process and in response to the Supreme Court's ruling? So I would say it's a great question, but not an easy one to answer in part because this is confined to selection, right? the ruling was confined to selection, and there are very clear concerns around collusion. No one is sharing or committed to the idea that we would provide, you know, a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone to adopt. I will say that holistic admission is something that many selective environments have done for many years, and there are best practices in that space that are not

in the space of collusion. As I said earlier, the triangulation of the required components of the application, a commitment to individualized review, those are things that we do talk about very openly and candidly because they're not institution-specific. But in terms of, you know, who has done this particularly well, to be quite honest, I don't know that anyone is at a point where they can say that they have, you know, that they have the secret sauce. So in states such as California that previously got rid of race-conscious affirmative action. We have seen the results, and people haven't been super inspired by those results

in terms of diversity, and people are fearing that we're going to see something similar at all the other schools now in the different states. How optimistic or pessimistic should we be? I don't think that we can or should expect better results, when we've introduced more variables and barriers, right? I'm not a pessimist, but I'm a realist, you know, and I know that previous experiences in other states that have banned affirmative action,

you know, have not, as you alluded to, have not been positive. So why would we think now that we're going to achieve or even match or maintain the kind of diversity that we had prior unless we make very concerted efforts, which we're committed to doing, but we won't again know because it's speculative, right? The landscape has shifted dramatically in higher education over the last four to five years, in part because of the pandemic, right? And also because of adoptions of test optional policies, because of student behavior, applicant pools in some cases have, you know,

not doubled, but have gone up dramatically. Based on what we know now, I'm not expecting that we're going to be at the same place. I'm expecting that we're going to commit, you know, and make every effort. and certainly hope that we reach our goals. But it's going to be a tall order for a lot of us. Amin, thank you. Jeannie, it was a pleasure. Thank you. Amin Abdul Malik Gonzalez is vice president

and dean of admissions and financial aid at Wesleyan University. Jeannie Suk Gerson just published an essay called The End of Legacy Admissions could transform college access. And you can read that at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin, and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.