Well, how is legacy admissions free speech and affirmative action “prejudice” and illegal according to the Supreme Court? Neither is based on merit alone.
No I am not arguing for or against affirmative action in college admissions. I am Black and graduated from an HBCU. I haven’t had a reason to think about affirmative action deeply enough to have an informed opinion.
Race is a protected class. Wealth is not. A bank can require a certain amount of money to be deposited in a checking account to qualify for certain cards and benefits. They can't just say "this card is for X race only".
Fine. If it’s not in the public interest. A “private” college shouldn’t be eligible for federal financial aid, tax exempt status, etc just like a bank isn’t. We should tax earnings from their endowments too
"Public interest" isn't an excuse to strip tax exempt status or withhold funding on a whim. The government cannot simply remove the tax exempt status of the NRA or Planned Parenthood because it decides that the organization doesn't serve public interest.
> The government cannot simply remove the tax exempt status of the NRA or Planned Parenthood because it decides that the organization doesn't serve public interest.
The (aggregate) government is the only one who can, as it's the only one who granted the status. The idea that something is ironclad because it's enshrined in law, is a failing to consider history. Laws change.
If you want to argue that it's unlikely, this also depends largely on those who have the money (or power) to fight for the change. I would agree there is not enough public sentiment, despite the wealth inequality implications, for private universities. Planned Parenthood? I think we got awful close.
Either way, it could be done. It is important not to dismiss the possibility.
There are specific laws about university endowments and how they can be spent. There isn't a single vault full of money called 'The Endowment.' It's thousands and thousands of buckets, each earmarked for specific purposes, usually invested so that the university can function off the investment of the endowment monies, instead of the endowment itself. But even so, many if not most of those buckets cannot legally be spent. Stanford can't reach into 'the endowment' and throw money at a problem.
Yes, university donors often give grants to specific programs and initiatives. And those very same donors are the ones that have the biggest stake in preserving legacy admissions. They'd have zero issues funding a legal defense of legacy admissions.
The NRA also doesn’t get public subsidies from the government in the form of student loans nor is their membership exclusive. Anyone can join the NRA and anyone can walk into planned parenthood
And if you want to compare it to a bank - a bank pays taxes
Don't get me wrong: I think legacy admissions should be eliminated. And my understanding is that my university (Carnegie Mellon) has stopped considering legacy status as part of admissions.
But the answer is that legacy is a one-hop removed racial bias instead of a direct one, where the schools engaging in it can claim that it's based on a purely financial incentive and that it applies equally to all of their legacies. It's like money laundering for bias: Finding a proxy metric that happens to correlate extremely well with race but never explicitly mentions it. With the current supreme court, that laundering seems kinda likely to succeed.
You actually have it backwards. Your claim is that legacy admissions bias in favor of the predominant race might be true for a school that had race-blind admittance criteria. In the opposite case, however, legacy admissions bias against people of the predominant race (for the general student).
Since legacy admissions come first, schools which practice affirmative action have a heavy bias against the predominant race (because those slots are all filled by legacy candidate). Which means that if you're of the predominant race, you have next to no chance to be accepted by these universities... (I mean, everyone has next to no chance, but for people of the predominant race, they are discriminated against severely).
In general, though, college admissions are pretty terrible... Having spoken with someone who worked in admissions at one of these universities, if you have a bright kid, you're better off moving to the middle of nowhere to make sure they're the valedictorian, rather than trying to send your kid to a great high school where why might only be salutatorian. Why? For smaller schools they rarely take more than one student from that school in any given year, so when the valedictorian who filled out applications to 10 top schools gets in to all 10? The salutatorian doesn't...
No I am not arguing for or against affirmative action in college admissions. I am Black and graduated from an HBCU. I haven’t had a reason to think about affirmative action deeply enough to have an informed opinion.