Acceptance into college may be more related to an applicant’s bloodline than test scores, according to a new study from a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

A student is 3.13 times more likely to be admitted to a college if he or she has a family member who is an alumnus, according to the study.

Michael Hurwitz, author of the study, used admissions records from 30 highly selective schools, including Ivy Leagues and liberal arts colleges, but agreed not to release the names of those schools involved in return for the data. He sampled 133,236 students and analyzed the 61,962 who applied to more than one of the elite colleges, according to a Jan. 8 New York Times article.

‘I was able to take into account all the applicant’s characteristics,’ Hurwitz said in the article, ‘because they were the same at every school they applied to. About the only thing that would be different was their legacy status.’

The study was conducted to provide colleges with information they may not have had access to and test a methodology called conditional logistic regression, according to the abstract of the study. With this new methodology, he eliminated most of the possible biased outcomes.

During the past three years, Syracuse University applicants with alumni relatives composed about 15 percent of the applicant pool and 19 percent of the first-year class, said Nancy Rothschild, SU’s associate dean of admissions, in an e-mail. During the past two years, 515 students in the first-year class had alumni relatives, she said.

The Admissions Committee at SU considers it a ‘plus factor’ for a student to have an alumnus relative, but admission is not based on that connection alone, Rothschild said.

‘We consider academic credentials, special talents, community service and good citizenship along with whether the student will contribute to the Syracuse University community,’ Rothschild said.

A large reason for legacy admissions is to keep alumni happy because happy alumni are more likely to donate to the school, according to Hurwitz’s study.

‘Donations from alumni are increasingly important to the well being of this paper’s sampled colleges,’ Hurwitz said in his study. ‘They ensure academic excellence for future generations of students.’

The study provides further evidence that legacy preferences in college admissions are not just used as a tiebreaker but significantly increase a student’s chance of admissions, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy research institution.

Kahlenberg has also edited a book called ‘Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admission’ and said this form of discrimination based on ancestry is wrong.

‘It’s fundamentally unfair because it’s a preference that advantages the already advantaged,’ Kahlenberg said. ‘It has nothing to do with the individual merit of the applicant.’

ndgallag@syr.edu

 

 

Published on January 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm