We are just learning how the Supreme Court decision banning the consideration of race in college admissions affected the composition of this fall’s first-year classes, but two things are already clear.
First, many selective colleges saw large drops in Black enrollment. Second, if we want diverse student bodies, we need to remove as many barriers as we can.
That is what California just did. It became the fifth state–after Colorado, Virginia, Maryland, and Illinois–to ban legacy admissions, one of the more obvious barriers to diversity in college admissions. Massachusetts should become the sixth state.
Whether during its informal sessions this month or in the new two-year session that begins in January, the Legislature should prioritize a bill to ban public and private colleges from providing an admissions advantage to the children of alumni.
Three-quarters of Americans and seven out of eight college admissions deans think colleges should not consider where an applicant’s parents went to college when they decide who to admit. Banning legacy admissions is long overdue, but it’s even more imperative now after seeing the harm to campus diversity that has resulted from Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard, the
Supreme Court's landmark 2023 decision that banned the consideration of race in college admissions.
My organization has been tracking the enrollment outcomes at highly selective institutions, and Massachusetts has seen large declines in enrollment of students of color. The percentage of freshmen who are Black declined at six of the seven most selective colleges and universities in the Commonwealth (Williams College was the exception). But it also declined or stayed flat for Asian American students at a majority of these schools. Hispanic enrollment was flat or slightly up at four institutions, but declined significantly at three of them.
Although it’s not easy to say why the enrollment of students of color declined at so many colleges, it may have something to do with three priorities of elite colleges that heavily tip the scales in favor of rich, white applicants: athletes, independent schools, and legacies. All three will need to be addressed, but getting rid of legacy preferences should be low-hanging fruit.
Legacy admissions disproportionately harm students of color and low-income students, because most of the beneficiaries are white and rich. Numbers are hard to come by when it comes to legacy preferences, since colleges hide the data, but we do know from the SFFA lawsuit that seven out of 10 Harvard legacies are white even though only four out of 10 applicants are white.
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