Will Affirmative Action Debate Kill Legacy Admissions?

In The News

November 7, 2022

From Inside Higher Ed

By Scott Jaschik

November 7, 2022

When the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on affirmative action last week, affirmative action was not the only controversial admissions practice to come up. Justices on both sides of the main debate also discussed legacy admissions, the practice of giving a preference to the children of alumni.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “A university can take into account and value all of the other background and personal characteristics of other applicants, but they can’t value race.” She said she worried “that that seems to me to have the potential of causing more of an equal protection problem than it’s actually solving.”

She offered a hypothetical example involving two applicants to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Jackson recused herself from the Harvard University case.)

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