No need to end legacy preferences

I'd planned to avoid the recent legacy admissions debate, since people usually ignore the opinion of a possible beneficiary. But so far neither side has gotten the story quite right.

Preference is given to alumni children only et ceteris paribus, never to the exclusion of more qualified non-legacy candidates. Exactly what bristles critics about using this seemingly innocuous deciding factor for otherwise indistinguishable candidates instead of something even more arbitrary, like a coin toss, is unclear. Recent criticism has been driven primarily by the negative connotations of the words "elitist" and "rich," both frequently and irresponsibly ascribed to the entire legacy demographic, and by disgust for the idea of tradition for tradition's sake.

Yes, we can all agree that existence does not justify perpetuation. But there's no rationale in eliminating a "tradition" simply because it is objectively "traditional" — that is, old. We must also consider the moral and financial value of legacy preference.

Suppose your cousin and a total stranger get into a no-fault traffic accident. Both need one pint of blood, which you, a strapping young thing of over 110 lb and high iron levels, can supply to only one person. You would not hesitate to give the blood to your cousin — even if she needs it no more and no less than the otherwise indistinguishable stranger — because she is family.

Princeton faces a parallel moral choice in its admissions. Princeton is more than a temporary aging vat; it is also a family, and its alumni are its kin. By definition, the quality of the student body does not suffer in taking a legacy over an equally qualified non-legacy, but there is a moral opportunity cost, a disloyalty, in not doing so. Loyalty to family, especially when there is no greater principle at risk, is important.

Even if the school felt it bore no loyalty to its alumni, it still has the duty to minimize harm; the school knows that a rejection letter will likely cause greater trauma to a family that has been emotionally investing in the next generation's admission to Princeton for decades than to a family of an equally qualified but less invested candidate.

More practically, maintaining a good and loyal relationship with alumni is important for financial reasons. The author of last week's column on the policy argued that alumni will eventually forget about the fashionable "tradition" of legacy preferences. But this admissions policy is not based on mutable societal values, like women's entitlement to education, but on immutable human nature.

When (and if) you, dear undergraduate reader, have a child some day, you are going to think he is brilliant. And when (and if) he is rejected by your alma mater, you will not be mad at the school for not showing loyalty to you; you'll be mad at the school for being blindly idiotic. Your kid will likely have had all the education privileges growing up that you had and then some. You will have pushed him in the obsessive way you — and your parents — have pushed yourself. And the nerve of the University to not recognize his potential!

An alumnus whose kid is rejected is pissed because his kid is rejected, not because the kid didn't receive special preference. The Princeton Alumni Weekly is rife with such letters from irate alumni eager to publicize the academic virtues of their kids and their own philanthropic virtues.

Not only is there an incentive to give when the school shows loyalty to its alumni, there is also an incentive to stop giving when the school rejects your obviously brilliant kid. Granting extra consideration to a few meritorious legacies diminishes a deterrent to donations.

Contrary to popular characterizations, not all alumni are rich, and proponents of legacy preference do not expect a one-to-one financial return for each admit helped by his legacy status, since the school does not tell families whether their legacy status had any affect on their admissions results. But helping out a few alumni kids on the cusp is a benign gesture that can help grease Annual Giving's wheels nonetheless.

It may sound repulsive or cynical to say the school is after money, but even the anti-capitalist snobs out there must acknowledge that money facilitates the school's excellence by sustaining the financial aid pool and providing rich academic resources. Showing slight preference to legacy applicants in admissions limbo is a moral means to a moral end. Catherine Rampell is a sophomore from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be reached at crampell@princeton.edu.