I’ve often heard defenders of racial preferences in college admissions invoke so-called legacy preferences—the preferences given children of alumni. Insofar as their point is that legacy preferences are also a departure from making admissions decisions based on measures of merit, I agree. But the legal objection to racial preferences isn’t that they depart from considerations of merit; it’s that they violate constitutional and statutory bans on race discrimination.
Some of those who invoke legacy preferences might instead be objecting to the racially disparate impact that legacy preferences have (because whites make up a larger percentage of, say, Harvard alumni than of the broader population). But absent a highly improbable showing that colleges use legacy preferences because of that disparate impact, that objection likewise fails to engage the legal arguments against racial preferences.
I’ve just run across a very different, and much more promising, argument about how legacy preferences bear on racial preferences. In an amicus brief in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Caltech professor Fiona Harrison (represented by law professor Alan Morrison) argues that the legacy preference, because of its disparate impact, “significantly undermines Harvard’s stated goals of seeking a class that is racially and socio-economically diverse.” Under the Equal Protection standard that Title VI has (wrongly) been held to incorporate, it’s difficult to take seriously that Harvard regards racial diversity as a compelling interest and can satisfy strict scrutiny in how it pursues that interest when its legacy preference “directly undermines Harvard’s stated [diversity] goals.”