Theory & Practice is an occasional series that explores trends in academic research, technical fields, management science and technological breakthroughs that may, or should, impact the practice of fundraising. This series aims to translate and interpret technical subjects for development leaders in hopes of spurring discussion and innovation in the fields of development and alumni affairs. This special commentary was authored by Darrow Zeidenstein, Ph.D., vice president for resource development at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Darrow was formerly a senior consultant with Marts & Lundy.

Among elite institutions of education, especially in higher education, the development office walks a tight line in facilitating the admissions of legacy children, especially those of wealthy and influential alumni. On the one hand, the development office does not have the direct authority to admit applicants and must respect the cardinal virtue that acceptance into the institution is not for sale. On the other hand, the development office represents alumni and donor interests within the institution and has the obligation to mediate strategically the hopes of the parents and the institution’s admissions policies.

In an op-ed in the New York Times¹, Richard D. Kahlen- berg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, bulldozes his way through the nuances of legacy admissions to rail against all institutions with a legacy preference, regardless of their distinct characteristics. Explicitly drawing encouragement from the anti-elite sentiments of “today’s populist moment”—that is, the “Tea Party”—Kahlenberg ironically calls upon the Tea Party’s favorite bête noire, the US government, to outlaw alumni preferences receiving government money or, as a next-best step, limiting the tax deductibility of alumni donations to institutions with a legacy preference admissions policy.

Kahlenberg’s policy recommendations rest on two pillars: an appeal to core values and an analysis of economic impact. His values argument is essentially that it is fundamentally un-American for elite institutions to grant admissions preferences to the rich and powerful over the meritorious. The article quotes “studies” that show that legacy preferences add up to the equivalent of 160 points on the SAT and would, therefore, crowd out more meritorious students from admissions.

There is, of course, much assumed under the hood of this racing car argument. The SAT is not the best indicator of predicted first-year college success (high school grades are²), and most elite universities view a high SAT score as, at best, a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for admissions. Although Kahlenberg refers to studies showing up to the equivalent of 160 points on the SAT, this does not necessarily mean, even if true, that most, or even more than a few, give this much more weight to legacy than to the SAT scores. This is an important point to consider in that differences in SAT scores of fewer than 120 points are relatively meaningless³. Given that admissions officers at elite institutions have more qualified applicants than they can admit, the biggest issue for them is figuring out how to shape the overall acceptance pool to meet larger institutional goals, of which maintaining family legacies is but one among many considerations. Furthermore, the low marginal cost of applying to universities and the even lower marginal cost of identifying a set of institutions for the meritorious student to apply mitigates the alleged harm of meritorious, but non-elite, applicants from gaining admissions into an elite university.

Kahlenberg’s economic argument—and the one that has been blindly accepted and disseminated across the mass media—aims to debunk what he calls elsewhere the myth of increased alumni giving as a result of legacy preferences. Drawing exclusively on a study from Winnemac Consulting published in a book he edited,⁴ Kahlenberg quotes Chad Coffman, Tara O’Neil and Brian Starr of Winnemac arguing that “there is no statistically significant evidence of a causal relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving.” Indeed, the Winnemac Consulting authors assert at the beginning of their study that “As far as we can tell, since these claims seem never to have been documented empirically, it is time to bring empirical data to the debate and test the claim of a link between legacy preference policies and alumni giving.”⁵

In fact, these claims have been documented empirically in two studies by Jonathan Meer and Harvey Rosen, cited in Winnemac’s study.⁶ Meer and Rosen’s studies draw upon a richly granular dataset from an anonymous, private research university. Based on this dataset, the authors’ regression model suggests that for this particular elite private university the probability that alumni who are also parents of an enrolled student will give increases by almost 13 percentage points. Likewise, the probability these parents will become class leaders (i.e., become large donors) increases by almost 10 percentage points. The authors’ model shows similar positive effects for other familial relations, although not as pronounced.

The Winnemac’s authors attempt to counter these conclusions by asserting that the Meer and Rosen study on family bonding does not adequately control for income, which might account for the increased incidence of class leadership among institutionally bonded families. This is a bizarre claim in that Meer and Rosen ran alternate specifications to their model that held variables of income steady but yielded similar results. While it would be sloppy to assert that legacy admissions policies directly and significantly increase philanthropic giving across the board for every institution, it is likewise inaccurate to claim there is no such rigorous study that demonstrates such a link.

Of course, fundraising professionals reading this column require no regression model to know with absolute certainty that family legacy bonding is part and parcel of multi-generational principal-gift giving. Indeed, many of today’s elite universities achieved greatness by great families taking great pride and making transformational gifts to a favored institution. The sort of broad-scale statistical analysis Kahlenberg relies on to undercut philanthropy as a justification for legacy preferences will average out the relatively rare, high-impact gifts made by deeply invested family stakeholders. Multi-generational family legacies take the lead in fundraising campaigns and take an expansive view of the institution by volunteering at, and giving to, a wide range of schools and units on campus.

There is something deceptively pernicious about Kahlenberg’s policy diktat: an elitism that dresses itself up as populism. While Kahlenberg argues the values case for meritocracy, his one-size-fits-all elimination of family legacies takes away the ability of individual institutions to shape and live by their own cultures and values. In effect, Kahlenberg imposes his own values on all institutions without demonstrating social-societal gains we accrue by doing so. Notre Dame explicitly and proudly matriculates one quarter of their applicant pool as legacy admits, although the legacy “sub-pool” is plenty competitive and admitted students must be qualified.⁷ The point is this: Individual schools are and should remain in the best position to decide the diversity of the matriculant pool, the values used to shape this pool, and the quality and kind of relationships it has with alumni—so long as such decision power does not directly violate law or offend basic human decency.

¹ See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/opinion/30kahlenberg.html
² See: http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_TEN_MYTHS_ABOUT_SAT
³ Ibid.
⁴ Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions (2010).
⁵ Ibid, p. 101.
⁶ Meer, Jonathan and Rosen, Harvey S, “Family Bonding with Universities,” Res High Edu (2010) 51: 641-658; and “Altruism and the Child-Cycle of Alumni Donations,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2009, 1:1, 258-286. Both studies are freely available for download at http://econweb.tamu.edu/jmeer/research.html. I thank Jonathan Meer for making these available and for providing me his insights into this discussion.
⁷ Based on 2007-2008 data, Notre Dame admits 40% of its legacy applicants versus 24% for the overall pool.