> Do universities keep admissions data at that granular of a level?
In my experience, yes. (It's an outright question on many college applications.) But this law, together with the older one, mandate recording and retaining these data.
> would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such
This is a good way to turn a reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy with intent to defraud the state charges.
Yeah, I don't think so. There's no paper trail. Whether it's in person interviews or not, having a "culture fit" isn't what's in the law. Unless, allowing in legacies is mandated from above and documented, you're gonna have a hard time showing criminal conspiracy. If the form doesn't allow you to put in "legacy" commentary, there will even be "evidence" that it wasn't. If you want to embarrass them, just do it. Spend the capital (political or otherwise) to put it in the media, but pretending it's going to criminal court is kinda out there without some other political motive.
Frankly, there are bigger discrimination problems for qualified applicants than legacy for admissions at the most selective colleges. Certainly, nobody is going to prevent "athletic" ability, "extracurricular" experience, or SAT coaching in admissions.
There is no paper trail so there won’t be many criminal cases…
…but there is no paper trail so they might not be able to “fast track” legacy kids into the university so easily, it’s logistically hard to cheat for so many kids during the many steps of the process without creating a ton of evidence.
I don’t think it will make the problem go away, but I do think it will reduce the number of legacy rich kids getting accepted, simply because the bar is put higher (for parents’ influence).
Sure, alumni interviews may favor legacy, though if alumni start broadly asking about it I could see legislation targeting that being inspired.
> allowing in legacies is mandated from above and documented, you're gonna have a hard time showing criminal conspiracy
OP seemed to suggest creating a dummy variable to stand in for legacy. If that were to happen, and you could find communications basically admitting the purpose of that variable is to evade the law, yes, I could see criminal charges being brought.
More pointedly, you're describing an issue common to anti-discrimination law in general.
Here's a perfect example of a college essay turning legacy into culture fit:
The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a "Harvard man" is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.
John F. Kennedy's application essay to Harvard, in its entirety (he got accepted, of course).
Bonus points for brevity I suppose. And to be fair, Harvard (and all other colleges) was way less competitive back then. 1930s college and 2024 college are worlds apart in every way.
Has there been a prosecution for academic criminal discrimination or criminal conspiracy to avoid discrimination protection in the last 20 years? I mean there's Title IX, but the Supreme Court has blocked even sex discrimination rules.
Can you point to the requirement? I see that it says you can’t discriminate and enforcement mechanisms to document that discrimination isn’t happening.
I’m really not sure what you’re asking. You can paste the executive order #’s into google. You can search for affirmative action lawsuits on google, they are all related.
Depending on how much someone wants to politically punish someone depends on how much they are required to provide documentation and what kind of lawsuits they get into with the DOL. Here is one with Google [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201], which requires they comply with DOL data gathering requirements and affirmative action requirements ‘or else’. Here is a document from the Clinton whitehouse calling out similar [https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/OP/html/aa/aa...].
Schools often get impacted by department of education, NIH, and DOE grants. Sometimes by various state level programs, all of which transitively include similar language. I am not directly in academia so I don’t have links as handy, but the professors I know have all made clear references to the same thing going on.
The tricky part here is that in any given zero sum system (aka there are a fixed number of student slots, or open job positions, or affordable housing openings), you can’t ‘positively’ discriminate (aka affirmative action) on race (or any other concrete criteria) without ‘negatively’ discriminating on the same criteria to someone else. It’s a basic control system thing. It’s literally impossible for it to not happen, as even a basic whiteboard session will show.
Which has been impacting East Asians, Caucasians, and often Jews pretty heavily for awhile. This is nothing new, really. Harvard has been trying to limit Jews in its membership in particular since at least the 1920’s if I remember correctly.
But since discrimination (negative) based on race/ethnicity is clearly illegal, but discrimination (positive) based on race/ethnicity is (or was) required, everyone involved except the gov’t is screwed from a documentation perspective as they’ll be documenting criminal activity in order to not be performing criminal activity.
So the next time the political winds change, they’ll have clearly documented malfeasance (looking from the other side of the equation) which can be used by the other side of the equation to screw them over even harder.
This is why the old US stance of ‘don’t be racist, being racist is illegal, and we don’t see race’ was a thing. It minimized the balkanization/tit for tat problem, while allowing punishing obviously obnoxious behavior. Similar to ‘don’t talk about politics/sex/religion at work’.
But, racism still exists of course (it’s a basic human behavior/in group-out group thing and literally no group is immune), and it was far from perfect as it also discouraged discussing a lot of problems - many of which got larger under it. But it’s not like getting them out in the open necessarily solves them either.
Or that there even is a ‘solution’, just different types of problems to pick.
No one has been prosecuting it, or none of the 6000 some odd universities/colleges have discriminated in the last 20 years?
I can believe the former, but not the latter. If it's the former, why do you think they would suddenly start prosecuting now for a difficult to prove criminal conspiracy to allow legacy admissions? Political reasons?
In my experience, yes. (It's an outright question on many college applications.) But this law, together with the older one, mandate recording and retaining these data.
> would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such
This is a good way to turn a reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy with intent to defraud the state charges.