It causes harm to minority students

The argument

Colleges should put an end to legacy admissions, this argument holds, because they do harm to minority students — the harm arising not from any stated intention but from the composition of the group the policy advantages. The first claim is about who benefits. Legacy admissions are policies that benefit white people the most, and that follows from what a legacy preference actually rewards: having a parent who attended the institution. Because admission in earlier generations was distributed under more restrictive conditions, the pool of people who can inherit that advantage reflects the composition of the student bodies of the past rather than of applicants today. The evidence offered is Harvard, the best-known institution for legacy admissions, where a study found that almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white. The consequence is then framed in terms of a fixed number of places. Because legacy students at these schools are more likely to be white than non-legacy students, every place allocated on legacy grounds is a place not available on other grounds — so the existence of legacy preferences limits access for African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American students. No applicant needs to be rejected on racial grounds for the effect to occur; the preference produces it by operating on inherited attendance. Proponents therefore treat the policy as part of a larger pattern rather than an isolated inefficiency: legacy admission policies support the racist and discriminatory systems that limit the extent to which minorities can achieve the same success as their white counterparts. Because the preference reproduces an earlier distribution of access at the direct expense of minority applicants, this argument concludes that colleges should end legacy admissions.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Colleges should not put an end to legacy admissions because they tend to put policies in place to benefit minorities in the admissions process. Colleges tend to give consideration to things like race and ethnicity when making admission decisions to ensure diversity and access to opportunities for people of all races and backgrounds. They also give consideration to things like whether or not an applicant is first generation or the socioeconomic background from which they come from; this consideration often benefits minority students. Furthermore, colleges put in policies such as affirmative action that help to improve the educational opportunities for members of minority groups and are designed to eliminate the unlawful discrimination that has historically existed among minority groups. Legacy admissions should continue because colleges make sure they take efforts to benefit their minority applicants and students.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The Harvard share describes the composition of the legacy pool, which follows from who was admitted a generation earlier. It records the inherited effect of past exclusion rather than establishing, on its own, that the policy now operates to disadvantage anyone. [Rejecting P2] The step from composition to harm is left implicit. Admissions are zero-sum only against the applicants who would otherwise hold those places, and the premise never identifies them or engages the counter's point that institutions run offsetting considerations for first-generation and low-income applicants. Calling the policy racist also imputes a purpose the evidence given does not reach: an inherited advantage tracking past exclusion can be indefensible without having been designed for that end, and the argument would be stronger for the weaker claim.