From Christopher Shea's
Boston Globe column:
Richard
D. Kahlenberg, editor of the forthcoming book "Affirmative Action for
the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions," points out
that universities in other countries don't give so-called legacy
preferences to sons and daughters of their alumni. (Even Oxbridge
colleges don't, despite the class-bound history of British education.)
So, he asks, why on earth do we do it in America?
Broadly speaking, students go to college in search of four things: certification; instruction; reputation; and connections.
In
terms of certification, any well-accredited school would do. In terms
of undergraduate instruction, the best deal for the money (and perhaps
the best deal period) is the small four-year school. (I'm leaving this
as an assertion but I'm fairly confident I can argue the point if anyone
wants to debate.)
In the next two categories, however, the Ivy League cannot be surpassed, in part because of the legacy system.
Without
loss of generality, look at Harvard. The student population of the
school consists entirely of two overlapping groups: people who can get
into Harvard; people whose parents can get them into Harvard.
The
first group is hard-working, ambitious and academically gifted.
Assuming the number of need-based legacies is trivial, the second group
comes from families that are wealthy (they're paying for a Harvard
education) and well-connected (at least one parent went to Harvard).
Putting
aside luck, you can put the drivers of success into three general
categories: attitude, drive and work habits; talent, intelligence and
creativity; reputation and connections. It is possible to succeed with
just one of these (hell, I can think of people who made it with none),
but there is a strong synergistic effect. A moderate talent who works
hard and has connections will generally go farther than a spectacular
talent who's lazy and isolated.
Connections are governed by the
laws of graph theory. I'm not going to delve too deeply into the subject
(since that would require research and possibly actual work on my
part), but as anyone who has read even the cover blurbs on
Linked or
Small Worlds
can tell you, adding a few highly connected nodes (let's call them
senator's sons) can greatly increase the connectivity of a system.
It
would be interesting to model the trade off between picking a well
connected legacy over a smarter, harder-working applicant given the
objective of producing the greatest aggregate success. Because of the
network properties mentioned above, it wouldn't be surprising if the
optimal number of legacies turned out to be the 10% to 15% we generally
see.
Optimized or not, this mixture is almost guaranteed to churn
out fantastically successful graduates regardless of what the schools
do after the students are admitted. I'm certain the quality of
instruction on the Ivy League schools is very good, but, like most
education success stories, the secret here is
mostly selection and peer effects.
Update: For a different interpretation (this time with actual data), check out this post at
Gene Expression.
