Instapundit cites Will Warren “fact-checking Trent Lott” on legacy admissions at elite schools (emphasis added below):

The Lott quote: “Again, you can get into arguments about timetables and quotas. Here’s what I think, though: I think you’ve got to have an aggressive effort in America to make everybody have a chance. Harvard has a program where one in three of their students are alumni children. That, you know, we need to balance this out more, and I think that we should encourage minorities to have an opportunity across the board.” …

Problem: not true. Not even close. According to the Boston Globe, children of alumni actually make up “about 10%” of each Harvard entering class. (www.harvard60.org/status.html).

Apparently the Senate Republican leader, having suddenly joined the enthusiasts for racial preferences, has immediately adopted their common practice of greatly exaggerating the institutional obstacles faced by black Americans today….

Googling for “the class of” and “children of alumni” or “alumni children” reveals the following percentages of alumni children in recent freshman classes of other institutions:

Princeton: 12.4%; 11.6% (different years) Yale: 13.4% U. of Penn.: 10% Brown: 7%; “about 10%” (different years) Columbia: 6% Cornell: 13% … [others with similar rates]

Those numbers look about right to me—- there’s no way that legacy admissions are 30% at Harvard. I seem to remember from grad school that Princeton, with 11 or 12%, has one of the highest rates of legacy admissions amongst the Ivies. Warren concludes by piling on the sarcasm:

I am just stunned by the injustice of it all. Do we really want to live in a world in which only 9 out of 10 students at our most elite colleges are not the children of alumni? In which, even at less selective colleges, only 95 to 98 out of 100 students are not “legacies”? Praise the Lord that the Senate Republican leader has seen the light!

Nice argument. So nice, in fact, that you can substitute “blacks” for “legacies” and it works just as well, if not better. Viz, “I am just stunned by the injustice of it all. Do we really want to live in a world in which only 9 out of 10 students at our most elite colleges are not the children of blacks? In which, even at less selective colleges, only 95 to 98 out of 100 students are not “blacks”?”

If you think it’s outrageous to question 5-10% set-aside rates for legacies on the grounds that 90-95% of students will still be non-legacies, then why the fuss over “enthusiasts for racial preferences”? The current system of counting race as a factor in admissions is, after all, rather more carefully regulated and administered than policies on legacy admissions. I have various qualms about affirmative action—- if nothing else, it’s very good at setting off pointless shit-storms—- but legacy admission to an elite schools is probably the most successful form of affirmative action in the U.S. today. It’s the intergenerational reproduction of privilege, pure and simple. Just look at the President.

Of course, if you’re black and don’t have family connections to essentially guarantee admission to Yale, you could always try looking for a job on your own merits. Though you might want to think about changing your name, first.

Update: Matthew Yglesias argues that “there’s a case to be made that legacy preference is a substantially different sort of thing that could be defended by an opponent of affirmative action programs.” One reason, he suggests, is that legacies are part of the price elite colleges pay for large donations. This is how Yale treated Montgomery Burns’ efforts to get his idiot son Larry admitted:

Admissions Officer: Well, frankly, test scores like Larry’s would call for a very generous contribution. For example, a score of 400 would require a donation of new football uniforms, 300, a new dormitory, and in Larry’s case, we would need an international airport.

Matthew rightly intuits that this might not be such a good argument to lean on. For one thing, it’s self-defeating when publicly acknowledged: “Harvard is proud of its long tradition of excellence, it superb facilities, and the c. 10% deadweight loss of less-than-stellar alumni offspring who help make this learning environment possible.”

He goes on to ask “Is affirmative action a necessary counterweight to things like legacy preference?” Personally, I don’t think that it is. (Legacy admissions are undeniably a form of affirmative action, but that doesn’t mean some system of counterweights is the best way to deal with things.) I didn’t make the link between the two issues, though—- the commentator cited by Instapundit did. And if one is going to make the case that 10%’s worth of special set-asides for the children of rich alumni is really just a drop in the ocean, and has no real negative affect on anyone, then I think it’s fair game to ask what that conclusion does to one’s position on race-based affirmative action.

Like Matt, I tend to be “uncomfortable with people who seem to feel that one of the leading injustices in contemporary America is that black people have it too easy.”