Just To Be Clear: We Don’t Do Legacy by Chris Peterson SM '13

A few students pointed me towards this piece in the Wall Street Journal about whether or not colleges should consider legacy in the admissions process.

For those of you not familiar with the practice, “legacy admissions” means preferring the children of alumni in the admissions process. Why would schools do this? For the money, mostly, because if you make your alumni happy by admitting their kids, they might be more likely to give you money. Advocates of legacy admission, like advocates of “development cases,” will argue that this makes the school a better place for the rest of the students by allowing them to build great labs and dorms and offer fantastic financial aid and everything else. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former President of GWU, made this case in support of legacy admissions, along with citing certain fringe benefits like “bridging” the generations by forming a sort of intergenerational club.

Meanwhile, Rick Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation characterized legacy admission as a “special privilege for the advantaged.” For you to receive legacy preference, it means your parents, and perhaps grandparents, went to a particular college. This means you come from a long line of educated people, who had the advantages of learning, who had the means to go to college in an era before broadly accessible student loans and financial aid. It means you are benefitting from work others have done. Kahlenberg argues that this is fundamentally unfair. Selective college admissions is a zero sum game: every applicant admitted takes a space which could have gone to another student. Preferring a student whose parents attended a college not only takes away a spot from an equal or better student, it specifically takes away a spot from an equal or better student who overcame more by not having the advantages accrued by prior generations.

Kahlenberg is exactly right, except for one thing: he mentioned MIT as one of the schools that practices legacy admissions, and we do not do anything of the kind.

This is something I thought we’d been pretty clear about. Mollie blogged about it back in 2006. Our institutional research website says, quite specifically, that “alumni relations” are “not considered.” And I can tell you, from having sat on countless committees, that we simply don’t care if your parents (or aunt, or grandfather, or third cousin) went to MIT. In fact, one of the things most likely to elicit a gigantic facepalm is when a student namedrops some incredibly attenuated connection because they think it is going to help them get into MIT.

So where did this idea come from? After a little academic archaeology, this is what I found.

In an issue brief written by Kahlenberg, the claim that MIT preferred legacies was cited (at 39) to “An Analytic Survey of Legacy Preference,”, which appears to be a chapter (written by Bloomberg editor Dan Golden) from Century Foundation’s book on legacy admissions. That chapter doesn’t actually contain any data, but instead itself cites (at 84) “No Distinctions except Those Which Merit Originates: The Unlawfulness of Legacy Preferences in Public and Private Universities,” by Shadowen and Tulante, 49 Santa Clara L. Rev. 51 (2009). Shadowen and Tulante, using almost exactly the same language later used by Golden and Kahlenberg, also write that “We also found data showing that alumni of CalTech, which grants no preferences, donated $71 million in 2007, versus $77 million donated in 2006 by alumni of legacy-granting MIT.” (emphasis mine) Here they cite (at 371) the “MIT Reports to the President (2005-2006).” While that report does indeed demonstrate MIT’s alumni donated $77 million in 2006, it says nothing about legacy admissions.

Update 10/10/23: Since publishing this blog post, I have learned from Mr. Shadowen about the sources he relied on for this conclusion that MIT granted legacy preferences. In particular, between 2004-2008, the MIT Common Data Set (CDS), which is published by our office of Institutional Research (IR), erroneously reported that MIT Admissions offered a legacy preference. We’ve corresponded with IR, and neither they nor we have any idea when or why this error was introduced, since there is no internal record of Admissions either having a legacy preference or communicating one to IR. Additionally, my review of our internal training materials – as well as my conversations on the matter with multiple former senior admissions officers whose experience at MIT Admissions goes back to at least the 1960s – gives me confidence that we have not offered a legacy preference in at least the last half century, and likely longer. IR has since corrected and annotated the relevant archival CDS files; we are grateful to Mr. Shadowen for bringing the error to our attention.  

It is indeed unusual for a school like MIT to have no preference for legacies. But one of the things that makes MIT special is the fact that it is meritocratic to its cultural core. In fact, I think if we tried to move towards legacy admissions we might face an alumni revolt. There is only one way into (and out of) MIT, and that’s the hard way. The people here value that.

I want to reiterate that I agree wholeheartedly with everything Mr. Kahlenberg said about why legacy admissions are bad. I personally would not work for a college which had legacy admission because I am not interested in simply reproducing a multigenerational lineage of educated elite. And if anyone in our office ever advocated for a mediocre applicant on the basis of their “excellent pedigree” they would be kicked out of the committee room.

So to be clear: if you got into MIT, it’s because you got into MIT. Simple as that.