The complaint against Harvard College’s legacy admissions, filed with the U.S. Education Department in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action, could spell the end to the practice of colleges giving a leg up to applicants of alumni — or it could end up providing the courts an opportunity to adjust how they’ll apply the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. 

Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a complaint July 3 to the Office of Civil Rights alleging that Harvard’s legacy practices violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They assert the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action at Harvard makes it “even more imperative now to eliminate policies that systematically disadvantage students of color.” It seeks a government declaration that Harvard is breaking the law.

The organization argues that “nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and they receive a substantial boost based on their status.” It calls legacy admission an “unfair and unearned benefit that is conferred solely based on the family that the applicant is born into. This custom, pattern, and practice is exclusionary and discriminatory.”

The complaint shines a spotlight on both legacy admissions and preferential treatment for the descendents of donors, whom it argues are “nearly seven times more likely to be admitted than non-donor-related applicants.” It alleges that “Qualified and highly deserving applicants of color are harmed as a result, as admissions slots are given instead to the overwhelmingly white applicants.”

Filed only days after the Supreme Court released its ruling on affirmative action, the case seems to be a direct response to the opinion of the Court. The executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, mentions the Court’s recent ruling explicitly in tandem with the complaint.

“There’s no birthright to Harvard,” Mr. Espinoza-Madrigal says on the organization’s website. “As the Supreme Court recently noted, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’” 

The complaint alleges that the legacy admissions violate Title VI, since legacy-based admissions disproportionately affect minority applicants. The American Bar Association explains that the law forbids institutions receiving  federal funding to have  policies that result in “disparate adverse impact” on groups “distinguishable based on their race,” even without intention, unless there is a demonstrable justification for the policy. 

A law professor at Boston University, Jonathan Feingold, says that he thinks legacy admissions lead to “a quite massive disparate impact that overwhelmingly benefits white — often wealthy — applicants to the detriment of all applicants of color,” adding that universities must now prove there is an “educational necessity for using the policy.” 

A Harvard spokesman declined to comment on the case to the Harvard Crimson, and did not immediately respond to a request from the Sun for comment.

A 2018 Inside Higher Education survey showed that legacy preference is not unique to Harvard — 42 percent of admissions directors at private colleges, along with six percent at public universities, said they consider legacy status when looking at applicants. 

Recent polls have found that a clear majority of Americans do not support race-conscious admissions or legacy preference. A YouGov poll reported that, of those surveyed, only about 20 percent thought race or legacy should factor into admissions decisions, while around 70 percent agreed each should not play a role. 

Yet affirmative action is perceived as a policy supported more by the political left: President Biden called the Court’s recent decision a “severe disappointment,” and all three Supreme Court justices dissenting in the case were appointed  by Democratic presidents. The case of ending legacy admissions is different, championed by those on both sides of the political spectrum.

One Republican presidential candidate, Senator Scott of South Carolina, told CNN’s Dana Bash that he believes legacy admissions should be ended. Conservative talk show host Ben Shapiro has also repeatedly called for the end of legacy admissions.

A former Harvard president, Lawrence Summers, who served as President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, called in a Washington Post op-ed for an end of “elite” universities’ “preferences for legacy applicants” and for universities to separately also reconsider their policies for athletes who play “aristocratic sports.” 

A fellow for the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, Katharine Meyer, says she does not see the dispute over legacy admissions as a partisan issue, though she notes the reasoning for opposing legacy might differ across the political spectrum.

“On the Republican side, you see much more of a push for being solely focused on academic elements and so wanting to have a greater emphasis on GPA, but standardized test scores as well,” Ms. Meyer says of the current admissions process. “On average, folks who are Democrats are more likely to support this holistic view.” 

Ms. Meyer adds that some Democrats and Republicans might also be in favor of legacy because they or their children stand to benefit from it, or because they support the idea of students having a “great affinity” for their schools, regardless of political affiliation. 

A student at Columbia College, Gustavo Alcantar, says that he believes there are “much more effective” ways to create a long-standing connection with a school than legacy admissions.

“I feel very much attached to Columbia despite the fact that I’m not a legacy admit because of the scholarly conversations I’ve had there, experiences with different student organizations, and just the environment in general,”  says. 

Several elite schools have already banned legacy admissions. They include Amherst College, the University of California Berkeley, and John Hopkins University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology avers that it has never considered legacy as a factor.

Amherst reports that, in the year following the ban, the percentage of legacy admittances dropped to six percent from 11 percent. Yet some caution that getting rid of legacy does not automatically translate to higher percentages of minority and low-income students. 

“If you didn’t take the legacy kids, you’d simply get the same kinds of people who would have gone to other places,” a former president of Harvard University, Neil Rudenstine, told the Harvard Crimson. “You’re not going to get more minority students. You’re not going to get more low-income students.”

Mr. Feingold, who describes the brief as “legally sound,” notes that he appreciates that the complaint “took seriously some of the language” from the Court’s opinion.

Mr. Feingold adds that “If ‘eliminating all racial discrimination means eliminating all of it’, then that should include legacy, which, in everything but the most sort of formalistic way, is racial discrimination.”

This article has been updated and expanded from the bulldog.