The Indian middle-class’ flight to meritocracy, we are often told, is the reason for the continued pull of America. But it turns out the American elite are as nepotistic as their South Asian counterparts; at least as far as getting a head start in college education goes, thanks to the practice of legacy admissions in the country’s top universities. Legacy applicants, that is those whose parents have studied in the college or made sizable donations, get an admissions bump equivalent to an extra 160 points on their SAT scores. It is indeed ironic that a republic founded on anti-hereditary principles has codified legacy preferences in college admissions. An incisive article by social historian Richard V. Reeves published recently in The Atlantic lays bare just how deep the problem runs and, more crucially, the efforts being made to fix it, which India’s top educational institutions with their infamous capitation fee quotas would do well to emulate. 

The president of Johns Hopkins University, which reduced the percentage of legacy students from 13 to 4 per cent as early as 2014, has written: “Legacy preference is immobility written as policy, preserving for children the same advantages enjoyed by their parents… It embodies in stark and indefensible terms inherited privilege in higher education.” In 2021, Amherst College too abandoned the practice of legacy admissions. US lawmakers have now lined up legislation against legacy admissions with a Bill introduced in Congress last month which prohibits colleges that get federal grants from giving an advantage to legacy applicants. Similar legislation is also in the works in the states of New York and Connecticut, while Colorado banned legacies in public colleges last year. Reeves points out that as far back as 2003, Senator Edward Kennedy proposed requiring colleges in receipt of federal monies to publish data on the economic and racial composition of their legacy admits; his Bill was defeated. The hope is that America has moved on since then, but powerful vested interests could scupper the move even now. 

Well-connected alumni of these colleges, even those who count themselves as progressive, are inclined towards a policy that will give their children a better chance of following in their footsteps. In fact, a USA Today poll showed that support for both legacy and donor preferences rises with household income, just like pulling strings or using contacts to get their offspring into prestigious colleges is a standard practice among upper-middle-class Indians, even if that means blocking an equally or even more qualified but less fortunate applicant. Indians take easily to the proposition that parents must do everything possible (and at any cost) to help their kids get ahead. But at least there are those in decision-making positions in America who recognise the problem and are willing to do something about the weakness of norms against nepotism and opportunity-hoarding. In India, ‘but everybody does it’ is deemed a sufficient argument for those who can do nothing about this unfair, anti- meritocratic practice.