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Friday, August 06, 2004
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LEGACY ADMISSIONS
Hard numbers be damned: UD would like to share with you her anecdotal experience of Ivy League grads and legacies. UD knows about five graduates per school (we‘re only talking about Harvard, Yale, and Princeton here), and, with one exception, all came from affluent homes, went to expensive prep schools, and had family connections to the college that admitted them. All of this might have changed in the last twenty years or so - UD’s friends are in their forties and fifties - but UD doubts the Ivy League has become much of a meritocracy. The loaded non-meritocratic dice at these schools is one reason a number of observers are pissed with Harvard’s recent practice of sending out flattering, please-apply-you’re-so-smart letters to high school juniors all over the country. Almost none of these students has a chance in hell of admission, but the practice increases the number of applications the university receives, which makes it look absolutely terrific when it turns them all down. (The pressure put on elite schools to stop with the Early Admissions business is another effort to overcome the expensive naivete of American kids who go to the trouble of applying to schools without knowing all aspects of a very complex system.) Americans have a right to ask those universities which are as much about the maintenance of an aristocracy as about intellectuality to be honest about this. If the universities were honest about this function, they wouldn’t have to dance around the question of why dim and ethically challenged people on the order of the young Ted Kennedy continue to be admitted to their schools, taking the place of brilliant virtuous nobodies. These schools would simply be able to explain that, as members of an established elite, people like Kennedys and Bushes will almost certainly - like it or not - assume positions of importance in the country, and therefore the country should give them the best education possible. That education is as much about important people meeting other important people on the same campus as it is about intellectuality. And yes of course the legacy system is also - these schools should admit - about maintaining the institution’s financial relationship with a wealthy high-profile family. Yet to say all of this in populist America is, UD supposes, impossible. Instead, everyone must pretend legacies don’t exist, or are exaggerated, or are really only extended to students who meet the institution’s academic standards, etc., etc. In a kind of ultimate absurdity, America’s President - a poster boy for legacy admissions - has today come out against them. |