Legacy for You, but Not for Me
In the ’90s, being a low-income student of color in the Ivy League was hard. Our population was minuscule. We were inside a place of privilege, but not fully part of it. The institution wasn’t built for us, and we knew it. We weren’t like the wealthy white kids whose alumni parents came to visit their favorite haunts in their favorite old college sweatshirts. But we were, we believed, part of a different future. And someday, we would have the chance to put on those sweatshirts ourselves and visit our own kids as students at our alma mater. We were writing a new chapter in these schools’ long histories, and we dreamed our children would be legacies.
Now legacy admissions are under assault. In July, the group Lawyers for Civil Rights sued Harvard over its legacy-admissions policy, accusing it of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and filed a complaint with the Department of Education.
