Legacy a necessary consideration in college admissions

As the heat of college-decision season draws near, it’s hard not to get caught up in the stress of the process. Like many of my pressured peers, I continuously find myself scrutinizing scattergrams on Naviance and the pages of collegeconfidential.com, viewing statistics of accepted and rejected students. Various factors determine an individual’s fate — academic performance, extracurricular commitment and personal essays, among other factors — but perhaps the most controversial of these factors is legacy.

Legacy admission (the practice of admitting students whose close relatives have also attended the private institution) has been a subject of debate for several decades. Its opponents claim that it is unfair and allows less qualified students to be admitted over higher qualified ones, and, for a long time, I agreed with this opinion.

Legacy admission just didn’t seem fair. I spent my days wishing that my parents hadn’t gone to public universities, where legacy is not a consideration. Why should these students have an advantage over me just because their parents went to a particular college?

Yet as bad as a world with legacy admissions may seem, the alternative is possibly worse. Essentially, legacy is a necessary evil.

As much as we’d like to think that private colleges and universities are some admirable symbol of justice, they’re not. They’re businesses, dependent on alumni donations and student tuition to function.

With private college tuition reaching as high as $60,000 a year, a student from a family who can likely not only pay full tuition but perhaps even donate more would allow these institutions to provide more financial aid to those who need it.

Is using legacy as an admissions factor “unfair”? Perhaps. But isn’t depriving lower-income students of the chance to receive more financial support just as unfair?

Some members of the “one percent” will even pledge millions of dollars to a college to ensure that their child gets in, giving the university the opportunity to fund new buildings and projects. As annoyed as the fact that some people could just buy their way into college made me, these institutions rely on these generous donations to provide the resources that they can to students.

While they do receive a significantly higher chance at being admitted to the school than students without legacy, legacy students often are already highly qualified. The impact of legacy varies from college to college (Harvard accepts one third of legacy applicants, while Caltech does not consider legacy in admission at all), but for several it is only a secondary consideration, often the factor that pushes a student to the side of being accepted when their other statistics have proven enough merit to be at the border line.

Anyway, colleges do not accept just any legacy applicant. Many of these students may have been accepted even without legacy. It helps, yes, but only to a certain point.

The fact is, getting into a reputable undergraduate institution is only a small part of the battle. What really matters is what one does once he or she is actually there. Being among the close to 20 percent of Stanford undergraduates with legacy may look good on a resume, but your 2.0 GPA — even at a highly ranked institution — will not.

Private colleges aren’t supposed to be “fair,” nor do they claim to be. Rather, they strive to create a diverse environment wherein students can learn and appreciate each other’s differences. Legacy admission allows for increased financial support to those who need it, allowing students of all backgrounds to thrive.

A world with legacy may be unfair, but, as I now realize, a world without it is even more drastically so.