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| | | | Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday, July 12. Today’s Briefing was written by Rick Seltzer, with contributions from Julia Piper. Write to me: [email protected].
Why legacy admissions persist
Exclusive colleges’ habit of favoring applicants who are children of alumni and donors has taken a public beating since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious admissions practices. And yet …
No college has mounted a publicity campaign to announce it will stop awarding legacy preferences in the wake of the court’s decision, our Nell Gluckman notes.
Legacy preferences persist because of money. These students tend to come from wealthy families and likely need less financial aid than their peers. They’re also considered more likely to attend a college if admitted.
- “If you can just keep that family continuing to send people to your high-priced university, you rack up $300,000 every time it happens,” said Holden Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former provost of Washington University in St. Louis.
Remember, legacy practices have long been standard practice at selective colleges. Among the 64 colleges that accept less than 25 percent of their applicants, eight in 10 gave children of alumni a leg up in admissions, a 2022 report found.
Still, some colleges have quietly dropped legacy preferences. Some have been doing so slowly, pairing the move with other changes like increasing financial aid as they seek socioeconomic diversity among incoming classes.
And colleges have nonmonetary reasons to consider a change. Most leaders aren’t comfortable with legacy admissions, according to data and anecdotes. Plus, details about Harvard University’s legacy practices are damning:
- An admit rate of over 30 percent for athletes, legacy students, children of university employees, and children of donors and others marked on a dean’s list.
- Compare this to an admit rate of 5.5 percent for the typical student.
- And 77 percent of legacy admits were white.
The takeaway: Eliminating legacy and donor preferences are tactics colleges will consider as they seek to build diverse classes under restrictions created by the recent Supreme Court ruling. But colleges are risk averse, and legacy policies help them build stable classes and budgets. Expect many to proceed with caution, and don’t be surprised if others quietly backtrack.
Read Nell’s full story here.
Quick hits
- Out-of-state students can be charged more than undocumented Texans: The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision, ruling on Monday that the University of North Texas can charge in-state tuition rates for some undocumented students who live in Texas while charging higher rates to out-of-state U.S. citizens. (The Texas Tribune)
- Prosecutors charge a New College of Florida student: Catherine “Libby” Harrity allegedly spat on Christopher Rufo, an activist who was named a trustee to shift the institution in a conservative direction, in May. Harrity called the charges “a scare tactic to silence and harass students.” (Sarasota Herald-Tribune)
- Johnson University closing Florida campus: The private institution added the campus, in Kissimmee, by acquiring Florida Christian College in 2013. But enrollment challenges and operating deficits prompted it to decide to close the location at the end of June 2024. (Johnson University)
- Rutgers approves controversial medical-school merger: The New Jersey flagship’s governing board voted to merge New Jersey Medical School, in Newark, and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, in New Brunswick, with students expected to enroll under the new structure in 2028. Critics worry the change will lead to less service for vulnerable populations. (NorthJersey.com)
Colleges get swept up in the Supreme Court’s ethics maelstrom
If you read one national politics story today, make it this Associated Press report on colleges leveraging Supreme Court justices’ campus visits to generate donations. If you read a second, make it this companion AP report on Justice Sonia Sotomayor encouraging colleges to buy her books. If you read a third, make it this report on colleges paying for justices to teach in exotic locales.
Both conservative and liberal justices have attended college-organized speaking events with donors and politicians. Colleges sought to use the justices’ appearances to reel in donors, the Associated Press reported, citing examples including:
- McLennan Community College, in Texas, worked with the conservative lawyer Ken Starr to draw up a dinner-guest list when Justice Clarence Thomas visited in 2017. Officials hoped Thomas’s presence would reward the institution’s current donors and entice new ones.
- A University of Colorado at Boulder official suggested a “larger donor to staff ratio” at a dinner when Justice Elena Kagan visited the institution’s law school in 2019.
This practice puts justices in the same rooms as big-money donors, who sometimes have interests in the outcomes of Supreme Court cases.
Justice Sotomayor has benefited from colleges and libraries buying books she’s written, with the purchases often being urged by her staff. For instance, when Clemson University planned to buy 60 signed copies of the justice’s book before a 2017 appearance, her staff said most colleges ordered about 400.
When the court isn’t in session, colleges have provided justices with all-expense paid trips to locations including Italy, Iceland, and Hawaii that are “light on classroom instruction, with ample time carved out” for leisure, the Associated press reported. The court defended the practice, noting justices are allowed to earn less than $30,000 in outside income and teach at accredited institutions. But the junkets are sometimes subsidized by anonymous college donors.
The context: Justices’ behavior has been under scrutiny since this spring, when ProPublica first reported on close relationships with billionaires and lavish gifts from the well-off and well-connected — including some benefactors who later had cases before the court. The AP learned about justices’ college-connected perks through more than 100 public-records requests.
This isn’t just an ethics issue for the court. These stories shine an uncomfortable light on colleges, whether they come off as influence peddlers seeking to capitalize on access to the rich and powerful or as somehow ignorant of the appearance of impropriety.
But wait. If it’s a secret that college fund raising works this way, it’s an open one.
- “It is not giving to the Clarence Thomas event,” Ken Starr’s widow, Alice, told the AP. “It is giving to the college at a later date because they were treated with courtesy and [invited] to a very special event. Every single college in America does that. And if they don’t, they are not fund raising.”
Still, that doesn’t mean it’s ethical — or ethical in the eyes of the public. With trust in higher education already plummeting, these kinds of dealings with justices who make up a deeply unpopular Supreme Court could prove damaging.
Comings and goings
- John Denker, interim senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer at the University of Arizona, has been named vice chancellor for communications and marketing at the University of Missouri at Columbia and chief marketing and communications officer for the University of Missouri system.
- Eun-Ok Im, senior associate dean for research and innovation in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University, in Georgia, has been named dean of the School of Nursing at the University of Texas at Austin.
- Andrea Tapia, associate dean of research and a professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, has been named interim dean of the college after Andrew Sears leaves to become dean of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, in New York.
To submit a new-hire announcement, email [email protected].
Footnote
The University of Missouri is receiving $25 million from the state to build a new meat-processing plant, replacing an existing facility. Officials say the plant fits with the flagship’s land-grant mission because it helps state agribusiness by showing off “the latest meat-processing research and technologies.”
This brings to mind the old saying, “Anyone who loves the law or sausages should never watch either being made.” It seems that colleges very much want to know — and indeed play a part — in how the sausage is made. |
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