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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We'll turn now to how colleges can build diverse student bodies after the Supreme Court's affirmative action ban. Wesleyan just abolished legacy admissions. Johns Hopkins did a few years ago, Amherst. Should every school do that? What about those spots reserved for athletes or others who still get special treatment? We'll talk about these early days of how colleges are and could be adjusting to a post-affirmative action world, including your calls with Tufts University Sociology professor Natasha Warikoo.

She has written specifically against legacy admissions as the easiest reform colleges could make. We'll talk about that and more. She is also author of the book Is Affirmative Action Fair? The Myth of Equity in College Admissions. Listeners, your questions and stories, and suggestions for admissions offices, welcome here as well. The actual admission staff, also very welcome to call in and add to this on what the discussion is like now in real time about legacies or any other aspect of what to do next, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Call or text or tweet @BrianLehrer. Professor Warikoo, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Natasha Warikoo: It's great to be here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can you first define legacy admissions? I'm not sure everybody necessarily understands what we talk about when we say that.

Professor Natasha Warikoo: Sure. Legacy admissions is a policy whereby if you have a family member, usually it's a parent, but it can also be a sibling, a grandparent who attended that university, you get a little bit of a leg up in the admissions process. You get a second look. That boosts your-- you still have to have strong qualifications and many legacy applicants don't get admitted but if you are a legacy, you're more likely to be admitted than if you have the same application and you're not a legacy.

Brian Lehrer: Back in 2020, so three years before this recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, you wrote an article in the Atlantic called The Easiest Reform for College Admissions, and it was this.

Professor Natasha Warikoo: Yes. The reason that I said that was because this policy while it plays a small role and there are many things that colleges consider in admissions, it's a kind of stain on the legitimacy of these universities. Because it's not so consequential in terms of what it brings to the universities, and it flies in the face of our ideas about equity and fairness. If we want to do anything that gives one group a boost over another, I would think most people think that that should be groups that are underrepresented and disadvantaged in American society.

Rather than groups that are already privileged through having a parent who's attended an elite university.

Brian Lehrer: Why have some schools ended them already?

Professor Natasha Warikoo: Brian, in order to understand that question, we have to understand why they have them in the first place. This legacy admissions is very long-standing and the history is about keeping it in the family in a way that I think really goes against our American values, again, of fairness of giving everyone a fair shot. There is this idea, which research suggests is unclear the impact on donations. Colleges expect and want their alumni to donate to the university. Some think that alums are more likely to do so when they feel that their children get a boost.

Imagine you've been giving to your alma mater and then your child who's probably very high achieving, doesn't get in, you might stop donating. That's the fear. I think these colleges that were practicing legacy admissions and then stopped, they're ones that have pretty healthy endowments. Amherst College, when they ended legacy admissions about a year ago, their endowment was $4 billion, $2 million per student endowment. At that point you think, well okay, even if they stop donating, we're going to be just fine. I do think that that's part of the calculus.

Johns Hopkins when they ended legacy admissions was after Bloomberg gave a lot of money to the university. Again, when they feel they don't have to worry financially, I think that's when they-- and I think they realize it's the right thing to do. I don't think any administrator thinks that this is somehow a policy that is fair to non-legacy students.

Brian Lehrer: There are a couple of pushback articles that I was reading knowing you were going to come on. There was one in The New Yorker called The Pointless End of Legacy Admissions, and there was a New York Times op-ed called Legacy Admissions Don't Work the Way You Think They Do. One of the arguments that especially The New Yorker article makes is that colleges and universities are ending legacy admissions primarily for public relations points. They don't actually change the makeup of the student body, the racial makeup, the privilege versus adversity score of the student body very much.

This is mostly a pointless PR move. What would you say to that argument?

Professor Natasha Warikoo: [chuckles] I think what I would say I would agree with in those arguments is that it's a small policy. I don't think it's a distraction. I think that it's-- Is it a PR move? Probably it helps the identities of these universities but I think that the point that if you end legacy admissions, the question is okay, if those few dozen students don't get in because they're less competitive now, who would get in. It's easy to think, oh, well then more financial aid students will get in but that probably is not the case because colleges have a certain amount of financial aid that they budget every year.

The legacy students are much more likely to not need financial aid. Those students maybe then get replaced by other students from high-income families. Does it increase access? In terms of household income, does it make room for more low-income students or underrepresented minority students? Unless you increase your financial aid budget or find money from somewhere, probably not. Again, I still think it's the right thing to do. It's certainly not harming the universities and again, flies in our face of what we think is fair.

Now overall, I think that the cards are stacked against students coming from low-income families, from underrepresented minority families because of the inequality in American society. To me, that is an even bigger problem that we need to solve but again, I think it's an easy one to fix. That's why I called it the easiest thing to do right now. Then we really got to attack this larger issue of access for these more disadvantaged groups.

Brian Lehrer: The op-ed and the Times even argue that non-legacy students, so maybe some of the less advantaged students, less privileged students, that they benefit from the connections of the legacy types. They benefit by going to school with legacy admissions who might come from privileged, very connected families. What would you say to that?

Professor Natasha Warikoo: [chuckles] I think of course we benefit from social networks to people who are connected to privilege, but I don't think that that's going to change if you end legacy admissions. There are still going to be plenty of privileged young people on these campuses. Your parent didn't go to Harvard, they went to Wesleyan or to Columbia. This idea that you're going to lose privileged students on these campuses, I think is a bit of a misunderstanding of what would happen if you ended legacy admissions.

Brian Lehrer: Now we know that affirmative action based on race fell because of lawsuits that were brought that wound up at the Supreme Court. Now I see the education department is inquiring about legacy admissions, specifically at Harvard, which of course was the target of one of the affirmative action suits that just ended in the Supreme Court ruling. Are you familiar with what kind of an investigation or inquiry is going on from the government?

Professor Natasha Warikoo: Yes, a complaint that on behalf of three civil rights groups by Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights was filed. That was specifically about Harvard. The federal government is then required to respond to these complaints, and that's why they're looking specifically at Harvard. Now Harvard is not that different than most elite colleges except for the exceptional ones that don't practice legacy admissions. I think everyone likes to go after Harvard because it's very symbolic. Harvard has resources. I think if this decision affects Harvard, it's going to affect all of these other places as well.

They basically say that this policy violates the Civil Rights Act. 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VI, says that if you have federal funding, and you're found to discriminate on the basis of race, the federal government can withhold that funding. That can be disparate impact. 70% of legacy students on the Harvard campus are white. A much smaller percentage of young people are white and even of the applicants to Harvard. They say, this has disparate impact and there doesn't seem to be a good reason for it, then you can be held in violation of the Civil Rights Act.

Brian Lehrer: John in Philadelphia, you're on WNYC with Tufts sociology, Professor Warikoo. Hi there.

John: Hi. I'm looking at a op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post recently-- well a few years ago, but it was discussing the issue of legacy admissions and Black alumni. The argument was that even if ending legacy admissions is the right thing to do for Black alums, it's things that it's happening now, just as Black alumni are starting to gain a bit of a critical mass in higher education. I graduated from Oberlin in the mid-'90s. At that point, it was one of the few schools I felt that had a really diverse student population.

Now, that's not the case at all in the sense that every school, and even Harvard, has a fairly diverse student body. It's not just the good old boy network of young men from prep schools.

Brian Lehrer: Compared to the past, at least. You're saying now that there might be a critical mass of Black alum whose own kids could benefit from a leg up in the admissions process through the legacy system, it disadvantages them as well as others.

John: Right. The student bodies these days and for the last couple of decades has a lot of people of color, or more than in the past.

Brian Lehrer: John, I'm going to leave it there for time. Professor Warikoo, what do you think about that argument?

Professor Natasha Warikoo: I'm sympathetic to that argument. It's true that if we take a generation ago, the people who are now the parents of applicants, certainly these universities were more diverse even a generation ago than two generations ago, on the one hand. On the other hand-- so I have sympathy for that, and it feels like just as soon as people of color can qualify, now we're going to end this, but it will always be a policy that is looking to the past and that is looking at hopefully a less diverse class than the class today.

Even compared to a generation ago, the percentages of Black, Latino, first-generation Native American students is higher than it was, say, when I went to college. If we think about it in that way, it is always going to be a policy that makes us stuck in the past. The reality is that if you are a person of color whose parent went to one of these elite universities, you probably have a lot of guidance from your parents. They are more likely to live in a neighborhood that has resources, that allows you to have the kinds of educational experiences that make you very eligible to go to these kinds of universities.

Maybe not that particular one. That it's not going to disadvantage you in the way that we might think.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you to pull back and talk not just about legacy admissions, which you've been describing as having a relatively minor impact on the makeup of student bodies, and ask you if there are other ones that we should be looking at. I think legacies are so easy to throw moral darts at that maybe we're overlooking other kinds of things. What about the spots reserve for athletes where they may not have the same academics as some other people who are admitted, or any other special consideration categories?

What should replace affirmative action in the way that it got struck down by the Supreme Court? Should things like adversity scores, as some people use that term, which could include aspects of their experience as racial minorities or in other ways, can they be used to replace affirmative action? What's the big picture according to you if you pull back the lens from just this relatively low-hanging moral fruit of legacies?

Professor Natasha Warikoo: I think overall, universities need to be looking-- I think about admissions as looking to the future rather than the past. Not what have you accomplished, but rather what do we expect you to go on to do? Now, nobody can predict the future, but if these universities are about, we want to contribute to society, we want to contribute to leadership, and this is how they talk about it in their mission statements, then how do admit a class of students that most enables us to do that?

I think one of the things that could be quite successful and that Berkeley did this a few years ago where they said, "Okay, admissions officers are going to first see the context in which you grew up in. What is the median household income of your neighborhood? Tell the reader about your school context." Then you hear data about this individual in that context. Just flipping that, that can make a big difference. More of an emphasis on what is the context in which this person has grown up, and how does that shape their lived experience?

What do they say they want to do in the future? What is evidence of their potential to contribute to their community, to underserved communities, to any community? Whether it's as an entrepreneur or a scientist or a teacher or a leader, whatever it is. I think that's how we need to think about admissions. Stop seeing it as, let's figure out the "most fair way" this idea that it's a meritocracy and the best of the best. With such inequality in American society, that's going to be impossible. It's not really what we should be doing. This is not a prize or an award.

It's admissions to further the goals of the university. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: In that model, what happens to the selectiveness of universities at all? If it means something to get into Harvard or some other very selective university, should it mean nothing?

Professor Natasha Warikoo: When you say should it mean something, I think it should mean less than it does right now, to be honest. There are so many amazing young people in this country. The President of Harvard once said, "We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians." Do some of them deserve to be admitted to Harvard more than others? I think there are many deserving young people who deserve a wonderful education, the education that I had at Brown at an Ivy League. There, frankly, aren't enough spots.

These universities, I think they should expand their enrollment, but still, we will not be able to-- so we need to be tied less to this idea that the person admitted to Harvard is more worthy than the person admitted to Wesley and who is more worthy than the person admitted to U-Mass Amherst. I don't believe that. I think we need to get away from that meeting, absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you one more listener question, and I'll note that this is the most common listener question we're getting in text messages. There are various versions of to what extent do universities admissions departments select students based on the possibility that they will become future donors. Where do legacy admissions fit into that? We have about five texts asking a version of that question.

Professor Natasha Warikoo: Absolutely. I think the legacy admissions is about future donations. It's donations. It's also, will you serve on the alumni council? Will you be part of the-- Can we tap you to go and recruit other donors? That's absolutely a part of it. There's a special category for the children of donors as well. Again, these are very small numbers, but I think it's symbolic. It feels like they're buying their way into these universities. I want to point out sports recruiting. There's also non-explicit mechanisms like sports recruiting.

You might think about basketball recruits who might come from an urban area with a low-- serving a low-income student body. There's so many sports that are like water polo, crew, squash, these sports that most kids in this country don't even have access to, even though if they have talent for those sports, let alone work hard to get recruited. Let alone go to these camps where they get recruited. The non-academic ratings was another piece of the research recent report that came out that seemed to privilege very high-income applicants.

A lot of them are going to private schools and they get very detailed, glowing letters from their guidance counselors. There's so many ways that these processes, it's hard to get out ahead of the ways that people who have resources will always do what we all do, which is to get the best for our children. We have to figure out as universities, how do we equalize that process? I think that's what we need to be thinking about.

Brian Lehrer: There's a little piece of the conversation that anybody connected to higher education is going to need to be having post-affirmative action ruling from the Supreme Court on many levels. Natasha Warikoo, professor of Sociology at Tufts University and author of the book Is Affirmative Action Fair? The Myth of Equity in College Admissions. Thank you so much for joining us.

Professor Natasha Warikoo: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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