Following the recent Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action policies in college admissions, activists have filed a complaint seeking to end legacy and donor admissions at Harvard, arguing it privileges white applicants, a claim that some say is without merit.
“The students who receive these special preferences are significantly more likely to be accepted than other applicants, and constitute up to 15 percent of Harvard’s admitted students.”
Such students are “overwhelmingly white,” the lawsuit stated. “For the period 2014-2019, nearly 70 percent of the students admitted with Donor and Legacy Preferences were white.”
The case argues that Donor and Legacy Preferences “disproportionately advantage” white applicants and thus “systematically disadvantage” students of color, including Black, LatinX, and Asian Americans.
“Though some legacy admissions are unmeritorious, these are outliers. Most legacy students have stellar academics. Their family ties are just an added bonus.”
Violation of Civil Rights Act
According to the lawsuit, Donor and Legacy Preferences are not justified by any educational necessity because “Harvard cannot show that the use of these preferences is necessary to achieve any important educational goal.”Such preferential treatment “violates federal law,” since Harvard receives “substantial federal funds” and, as such, is bound by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits practices having an “unjustified disparate impact” on a racial basis.
The lawsuit pointed out that since Harvard only admits a certain number of students annually, a spot given under Donor and Legacy Preferences is a spot that becomes unavailable to “an applicant who meets the admissions criteria based purely on his or her own merit.”
Ending Legacy Admissions
The lawsuit stressed the need to end legacy and donor admissions, particularly since the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the use of race as a factor in the admission process, which it claims has a negative impact on campus diversity.“Experts have found that reducing or eliminating Donor and Legacy Preferences enhances diversity in higher education—an interest Harvard has claimed to be of the highest magnitude. The fact is that, if the Donor and Legacy Preferences did not exist, more students of color would be admitted to Harvard.”