More on Legacy Admissions
Clearly inspired by Dan Golden, ABCNews.com has
its own piece on legacy admissions.
Here's what drives me crazy about this reporting: It's stupid.
The report tells the story of Jian Li, who got a perfect score on his SATs—seems like everyone does, nowadays—but got turned down by Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and others.
Yet, he soon became aware that other high school students with lower SAT scores had sailed past him.
"There are lots of preferences given to academically unqualified individuals." he said. "For example, George Bush. I doubt he had the academic qualifications that would have gotten him into an elite university [Yale], but because of who his father was, he had the advantage over other applicants with better academic records."
Two things: George Bush is the best example he can come up with?
And moreover, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if that many colleges turned Li down, there was probably a reason, and it wasn't that in every instance a legacy admit happened to take his place. (Legacies at MIT?)
What sense of entitlement tells you that just because you ace a standardized test, you deserve to get in to any particular university?
But wait...the piece ends by saying that Li eventually did get into Yale. So what's the problem here?
The endurance of this non-issue as an issue suggests that legacy admits have become a fall guy for students who are way too obsessive about getting into college...and if they are that obsessive about it, then a little rejection is probably a good thing for them.
