This month’s college-admission bribery scheme confirmed the worst fears of students and parents: The deck is stacked in favor of the rich. Although a relatively small number of well-off parents allegedly committed federal crimes to gain places for their children at their colleges of choice, the scandal raises a broader concern: Why are colleges so opaque about what counts in admissions? And given the enormous federal subsidies that even private colleges receive (in the form of financial aid and tax breaks), shouldn’t the public have the right to know more?
The little research that exists suggests that in addition to counting high-school grades and test scores, selective colleges provide substantial preferences for three categories of students: athletes, legacies, and underrepresented minority students. In a groundbreaking 2005 study of 13 selective colleges, for example, William Bowen and colleagues found that a student with a given academic profile sees her chances of admission jump 30 percentage points if she is a recruited athlete, 28 points if she is from an underrepresented minority, and 20 points if she is a legacy. By contrast, first-generation college students get a modest four-point boost, and low-income students get no advantage at all.
Almost certainly the reason colleges keep the process secret is because they would prefer not to have to defend their decisions.
The weighting of these considerations is wildly out of sync with what the public thinks should count. In a survey this year by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of the respondents opposed using race or ethnicity as a factor, 68 percent opposed considering legacy status, and 57 oppose opposed considering athletic ability. Being a first-generation college student — which Bowen and colleagues suggested got the smallest bump from institutions — gets more support (47 percent) than athletic ability, legacy status, or race and ethnicity.
A college can dismiss the Bowen data as out of date, or claim that while other elite institutions may operate that way, it doesn’t. We don’t know how Yale might operate differently than Stanford or the University of Southern California. Few people know the whole story, because colleges shroud the process in secrecy. Almost certainly the reason for this secrecy is that they would prefer not to have to defend their policies.
Both of us are most concerned about the undue influence of legacy in the admission process, which is tantamount to affirmative action for the rich. Compared with an applicant who is first in the family to go to college, the sons and daughters of alumni are likely to have had the early benefits of educated parents, a good high-school education (public or private), the availability of money to pay for test preparation, and all the other advantages that are denied to children whose family income places them in the lowest quintile.
Athletic preferences are also a concern. Is it right that sailing at Stanford or volleyball at Wake Forest are so important that recruited athletes have a guarantee of getting in? On the other hand, we support giving help to low-income and first-generation college students.
But the larger point is that short of a lawsuit, information about the weights of particular preferences and the numbers of students who benefit at individual colleges is not available. Requiring people to sue hardly seems the optimal way for this information to be made public. The rule for all kinds of preferences — including the ones we personally support — should be: Make the details of the policy public, and be prepared to defend it in the arena of public discussion.
This would not be transparency for transparency’s sake. The information about a college’s admissions-preference policies would be useful to a wide range of affected individuals — most obviously the applicants. Although high-school students can learn the acceptance rate for any college, as well as its GPA and SAT averages, they have no idea how many slots are, for them, effectively off limits because they are not star athletes, legacies, or members of a racial or other favored minority.
Likewise, alumni who are asked to contribute to a scholarship or other particular fund would surely like to know what the college is doing with its money. And there are public officials, in legislatures and elsewhere, for whom this information may affect their decisions on funding and other matters.
What information should be available? A good start, and a policy which the late Senator Edward Kennedy advocated, would be to require colleges receiving federal funds to disclose how many students benefited from legacy preferences and the racial breakdown of such beneficiaries.
More broadly, each college should disclose annually on its website how much of a boost a member of each preferred group receives, and how many admitted students benefited. If a legacy student’s close family member made a large donation — say, $1 million within two years before or after the student’s admission — that fact should also be posted.
To complete the picture, colleges should make public the percentage of students admitted and attending for each quintile of family income, so that promises to increase opportunities for disadvantaged children to get ahead can be evaluated. The Harvard University professor Raj Chetty’s eye-opening 2017 study described the economic makeup of individual colleges for a set period of time, but those data should be made publicly available on an annual basis, just as colleges appropriately disclose the racial and ethnic makeup of their students each year.
In the case of legacy preferences, other steps are possible — including the outright prohibition of such preferences for colleges receiving federal funds, just as the law currently bans racial discrimination. But full disclosure is an imperative first step — and is the type of idea that could gain bipartisan support.
With all that is at stake in college admissions, it is time to pull the curtain back on special preferences so that their existence and extent are subject to a full debate, both on the campus and off.
Alan B. Morrison is associate dean for public-interest law at George Washington University Law School. Richard Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and editor of Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions (Century Foundation, 2010).
