An Inconvenient Blog

By Abigail

California has finally done it! After decades of bitter debates, lengthy court battles, and public mudslinging, the Golden State has finally ended inequality in higher education. Who knew all you had to do was ban legacy admissions?

Most people can agree that life isn’t fair, and neither is the messy, arbitrary world of college admissions, but trying to get to the root causes of that issue is where the divisiveness comes in. Worried about the disproportionately low number of Hispanic and Black students in college? Try affirmative action! It’s all smooth sailing until concerns about its discriminatory effects on the chances of Asian students gunning for spots at elite universities come to light. Don’t like the reality that college can sometimes be a pay-to-play game? Well, why not eliminate legacy admissions and call it a day?

The issue is that all of these brilliant strategies are fundamentally band-aid solutions. I’m sure Askhan cringes at words like “structural” and “systemic” when they’re used in conjunction with “inequality,” but the problem with trying to address immensely complex issues like racial and socioeconomic inequality only when they manifest in a person’s senior year of high school is that you just can’t. I hate to use another oft-mocked word, but basically everything that makes college admissions so unfair comes down to the intersectional nature of the problem. 

Legacy applicants, especially those applying to elite institutions, are usually not just lucky in this one specific way. People who graduate from Ivy Leagues and want to send their kids to the same school twenty or so years down the line are not generally working blue-collar jobs or sending their kids to poorly funded public schools. Their children are more qualified than most applicants because they tend to grow up in middle- or upper-middle-class households with access to better schools and extracurriculars and support than their non-legacy peers. No one will forget the Varsity Blue scandal and all the similar stories of woefully inept teens whose parents finesse them into spots at the best universities in the world, but that isn’t always the way it goes. I mean, just having parents who went to college at all, whether it was UC Berkeley or Cal Poly Humboldt, means that you’re probably already slightly better off than your first-generation peers. 

It’s also silly to pretend that admissions officers are unilaterally devoted to the noble goal of simply finding the best students with the most potential. Aside from a small number of top schools, most institutions are not need-blind–they want students who can actually pay to attend. They want students who can demonstrate that they will succeed academically in college, and not lower the graduation rate. That means that something like a good SAT score matters, and it means being able to say you’ve taken several AP classes and done well on the subsequent exams is important. But if you grow up in actual poverty in America, you’re more likely to face a cascade of obstacles throughout your life that will ultimately hinder your ability to compete with other students who come from better-off households. You might have slower language learning and development, worse literacy, and poorer math skills. You might face more adverse childhood experiences, such as divorce or abuse. By the time you’re in high school, you might have less access to AP classes, test prep, and expensive extracurricular activities. By the time you’re actually applying to college, banning legacy admissions or implementing affirmative action policies that only consider race, and not income, is never going to level the playing field for you. Those policies only address the most superficial source of inequality. 

That is not to say that having college-educated parents or growing up middle-class means life is easy or that students with that kind of background don’t work as hard as their less-advantaged counterparts. I’m an outlier when it comes to a lot of the conventional wisdom on this stuff. I have college-educated parents, but I’m also a low-income student from a rural area who didn’t go to a good school (or, at points in my life, any school). How does a school deal with someone like me? There are numerous intangible but immensely important ways I benefitted from having well-educated parents who happened to sometimes struggle with finances and plenty of more tangible examples of how my lack of money or traditional childhood education disadvantaged me. The nature of this issue requires making sweeping generalizations that can never encompass individual variation or experience. There is literally no simple answer to any of this, which means that–plot twist!–California hasn’t solved anything. Life still isn’t fair! 

To make this dumber, you can argue legacy admissions itself isn’t even fair to its own applicant pool. There’s a difference between having parents who work in academia and being the child of a billionaire. The assumed threshold for what an admissions office considers to be a meaningful record of alumni giving seems to rise every year. And say your dad is a billionaire with a building named after him at Harvard but you’re also a literal math genius? Can anyone rightfully argue that you don’t deserve to go to a small college outside of Boston, too? 

I’ve always thought the answer to most of this is some system of income-based affirmative action. Using income as the metric to level the playing field is an easier way to capture the intersectionality of the problem. Poverty is more common among some racial and ethnic groups, and is often a good predictor of the quality of education someone will receive throughout their life. Most people in poverty will be first-generation college students. That means that it can target groups who are historically underrepresented in the student bodies of higher education institutions while accounting for the fact that other disadvantaged students might fall through the cracks created by policies that only look at racial identity or family educational attainment. But then we get to the real question–for all the polished PR statements about class diversity (be it racial, socioeconomic, or whatever else), are colleges actually willing to invest more in students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds to ensure they succeed? Probably not. And I’m sure that’s why we’ll continue to implement policies like the one California is so proud of while ignoring the heart of the matter.