Things may be different this time around, but we should not be too sure. In 2003, Senator Edward Kennedy proposed requiring colleges in receipt of federal funds to publish data on the economic and racial composition of their legacy admits. These recent efforts, however, are not the first time lawmakers have made a run at legacy preferences. Colorado banned legacies in public colleges last year. A similar bill is being considered in Connecticut.
A bill has been introduced in the New York Assembly and Senate that would ban the practice in both public and private colleges in the state. A bill introduced into Congress last month would prohibit colleges that get federal money from giving an advantage to legacy applicants. Lawmakers are starting to move against legacy admissions too. Daniels: Why we ended legacy admissions at Johns Hopkins “It embodies in stark and indefensible terms inherited privilege in higher education.” In 2021, Amherst College followed suit. “Legacy preference is immobility written as policy, preserving for children the same advantages enjoyed by their parents,” Hopkins President Ron Daniels has written. Johns Hopkins abandoned it in 2014, reducing the percentage of legacy students from 13 to 4 percent. This American anachronism may be on its way out. My eldest son has two parents who went to the University of Oxford, but if that fact had made a difference to his own chances of getting in, both he and we would have been appalled, as would all the other applicants. is a republic, a nation founded on anti-hereditary principles, where nepotism is not only permitted but codified-most obviously in the practice of legacy preferences in college admissions. The United Kingdom has a hereditary monarchy and a hereditary aristocracy, but strong norms against nepotism in education and the workplace.