Legacy Admissions

Legacy Admissions
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Legacy admissions
In the past decades, increased competition to secure admission to America’s leading institutions has led to a large number of educationally talented children facing rejection from their most preferred schools. The high competition can be linked to the decreasing importance of distance between an applicant and institution, an increased number of international applications, increases in financial aid and decreased acceptance rates (Hurwitz, 2011). Today, applicants who were likely to have a high chance of admission in these institutions a decade ago are now finding themselves on sprawling waiting lists. Consequently, students and parents are sharing any piece of academic achievement or extracurricular performances to their choice of college to improve their chance of being selected.
Thus said, the high demand for a spot in the nation’s selective institutions has led to the question of who the college should admit more difficult. While most applicants might think reasonable admissions processes are those that consider academic performance, such as SAT score and high school GPA, some institutions find such approach to be biased and one that fails to recognize the diversity in backgrounds of the applicants (Hurwitz, 2011). Consequently, these highly selective institutions are facing challenges of defining the appropriate selection criteria that will enable a college to preserve and improve its selectivity in the future. Therefore, tradeoffs are required to maintain academic excellence in these highly selective institutions while appreciating the efforts and commitments of each stakeholder.
Legacy admissions have been a controversial subject for a long time. For the past thirty years, many Americans have claimed that getting admitted into most of these highly selective colleges is either through good academic performances or through family history. Typically, children whose family members went to university, legacy can help them in the admission process in some of these universities (Larkin & Aina, 2019). For example, Harvard university admissions office has given preferential treatments to students whose one parent graduated from Harvard University or its sister school, Radcliffe.
Applying as a legacy in a college has been estimated to double a person's chances of being selected. In most selective institutions in the United States, 10-15% of the students had their parents or family member attend the school (Larkin & Aina, 2019). Thus said, opponents challenge legacy admissions based on fairness, arguing such arrangements opposes American human rights and constitutional values. However, from a legal perspective, there have been only a few manageable challenges caused by legacy admissions. In the 1980s, for example, the United States education ruled that legacy admissions do not discriminate against Asian American applicants as their children will benefit as much as the children of white alumni from this advantage over time. In reality, legacy admissions not only help in improving the institutions through financial aid but also help build cross-generational relationships with the institutions (Larkin & Aina, 2019).
Legacy policies...