Did Legacy Admissions Destroy the Credibility of a Harvard Degree?
More comments on Legacy Admits and Grade Inflation
It has been long known that Harvard, and many other elite universities, suffer from two simultaneous problems. First, they have notorious grade inflation. A recent op-ed at the Crimson shows that half of students have 3.8 GPAs - or higher! Second, they admit tons of legacy students. Back in 2007, I noted research showing that 15% of Ivy League admits don’t meet stated *minimum* requirements. More recent sources note that up to 36% of Harvard students are legacy students. Here, I offer some thoughts on the possible connection between legacy admits and Harvard’s eroding standards.
To start, I think it is quite possible that legacy students have accelerated grade inflation at Harvard and other elite schools. Even though the US has seen a bit of grade inflation, the situation at Harvard is dramatic. A common story is that grade inflation was a response to the Vietnam War. Since people were more likely to get drafted if they flunked out of school, professors gave easy grades to keep them enrolled. That may be true, but it doesn’t account for the non-stop grade inflation nearly fifty (!) years later.
My hypothesis is that a continuing large pool of non-elite students almost determines some additional degree of grade inflation, especially if those students have credentials that are way, way below the top third of the class. If you have about 35% of students who are in because of expected future donations, then faculty will almost be forced to inflate grades. They will be dealing with a large batch of students with noticeably lower skills and it would be wildly disruptive in most situations to flunk about a third of your class year after year. If you want a nice recent example, see the brouhaha at NYU over organic chemistry.
A related issue is that other processes may be masking the grade influence caused by legacy admits. Specifically, Harvard has become more selective over the years, with a current admission rate of about 5%. While 1/3 of the class is getting in because of their parents, the upper 1/3 of the class is amazing. In terms of grades, this upper third of the class should be able to ace most classes with a reasonable amounts of effort. So it will be easy for Harvard profs to give more As and sleep well at night. The courses stay the same, but the top students are getting better all the time.
This leads to another question: how have grade inflation and legacy admits impacted Harvard’s reputation? The answer is not at all - nobody (except me?) walks around and says, “Gee, anyone can get a 4.0 at Harvard - even the dim legacy kids!” Instead, the university still gets piles of applications, routinely ranks at the top of prestige surveys, and acts as a stepping stone for all kinds of elite careers. What’s the deal?
My answer: the bottom third feeds off the prestige generated by the top third. Most people think that all spots at Harvard, and other elite schools, are super competitive. The average person thinks that all kids from Harvard are like the Westinghouse winner who got in. Even in academia, we have a biased perception. We may get the best ones in our PhD programs, and routinely forget that a lot of other kids are coasting on easy grades and parental connections. It’s even interesting to note that social ties can easily cover up poor performance. If we see a Harvard line on the CV from someone at an elite consulting firms, we often ascribe it to high skill and forget that the job may have been facilitated by social networks.
A lot of people get into a tizzy about this. But I’ve come to accept this state of affairs after I understood that universities are necessarily political and academic institutions. Few universities can survive on academic purity alone. Sure, if I were a benevolent dictator, I’d ditch legacy admissions immediately but universities are social institutions that seek money and status. Finally, the world doesn’t seem to have suffered very much from massive grade inflation at elite schools. It’s ok, life goes on.
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I’m not sure that I understand the conflation of legacy and non-deserving admits. If an applicant’s parents went to Harvard, they are probably much more likely to have gone to elite private schools and been afforded expensive opportunities to stand out in admissions (tutors, gap years, non-profits). I agree that 36% may be too high, even compared to peer institutions, but I’m not sure I agree or see evidence for the general claim that 100% of legacy students are undeserving and weighing down admissions standards