The State of Colorado is banning public colleges and universities in the state from giving legacy students a preference in admissions, because it supposedly promotes “systemic inequity.”
State legislators Kyle Mullica and Sen. Brittany Pettersen, both Democrats and first-generation college graduates, sponsored the bill, HB 21-1173. In an op-ed for the Colorado Sun, Mullica and Pettersen wrote, “This practice of giving preference to students who have a family connection to a particular higher-education institution is discriminatory in nature and is a concrete example of systemic inequity.”
This comes in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling curbing the use of race in college admissions, and a civil-rights complaint against Harvard for giving preference to applicants whose family members attended Harvard.
Several other colleges and universities have banned legacy admissions, including Virginia Tech, Wesleyan University, the University of Minnesota, and Occidental College.
A statement from Virginia Tech reads, “Each summer, the university reflects on the last admissions cycle and adjusts procedures in advance of the next one. For this coming admissions cycle, changes include discontinuing the early decision option, formally eliminating legacy as a factor, and complying with the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to remove race and ethnicity as an explicit factor in the admissions decision process.”
The university instead plans to pursue alternative ways to attract minority students, such as “lowering barriers to admissions” and “creating effective pre-college programs.”
The children or grandchildren of alumni have comprised 20% of the incoming class, despite being only 12% of applicants.
Virginia Tech is also terminating its early decision option for high schoolers to “[level] the playing field” for all students.
President Tim Sands announced the Virginia Tech Advantage during last fall, a program to make the school more affordable for low-income students.
The university’s incoming class for fall 2022 was 40.4% “underrepresented minority students and underserved students,” which the school indicated was a “key milestone” in its strategic plan.
Virginia Tech is still committed to the buzzword of “diversity.” In 2019, Virginia Tech announced an official plan to “Increase representational diversity,” “Increase cultural competency,” and “Address critical societal issues impacting humanity and equity.”
“We know that diverse environments are the most powerful learning environments,” declared Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Affairs Menah Pratt after the ending of legacy admissions. “Our commitment to an inclusive university community prepares our graduates to engage with the world and its most pressing problems.”
Black and Hispanic groups have filed a complaint against “legacy admissions” at Harvard University, challenging its practice of considering family ties to donors or alumni when deciding whether to admit students. They argue that legacy preferences have a racially disparate impact against non-white applicants, because white applicants are more likely to be descended from Harvard alumni than non-white applicants.
Racially disparate impact does not violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which only bans “intentional discrimination” based on race, according to the Supreme Court, not “disparate impact.” But the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights says disparate impact can violate an Education Department regulation designed to implement Title VI (34 CFR § 100.3(b)(2)). Under that regulation, the Office for Civil Rights says that a colorblind policy can be found racially discriminatory even absent any racist intent by a school, if it excludes significantly more minorities than whites, and is not “necessary to meet an important educational goal,” or if “there is a comparably effective alternative policy that would meet the schools’ stated educational goal with less of a burden of adverse impact on the disproportionately affected racial group.” Many people think legacy preferences are not necessary to meet an important educational goal.
This disparate-impact regulation may be invalid, as the Supreme Court hinted in its decision in Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275, 286 n.6 (2001). The Supreme Court ruled in that case that Title VI only bans “intentional discrimination,” not disparate impact, and it called the government’s defense of federal Title VI disparate regulations “strange” in footnote 6 of its ruling. As the Supreme Court explained, “We cannot help observing, however, how strange it is to say that disparate-impact regulations” are valid applications of Title VI, when Title VI “permits the very behavior that the regulations forbid…..’If, as five Members of the Court concluded in Bakke, the purpose of Title VI is to proscribe only purposeful discrimination … , regulations that would proscribe conduct by the recipient having only a discriminatory effect … do not simply “further” the purpose of Title VI; they go well beyond that purpose.’”
