God And Man At UM

OOOOh. Julia eviscerates William B. Fuckley.

And finds an inconvenient little factoid that has gone missing from the press accounts of the case.

What he didn’t add, from the same article in the Wall Street Journal he’s quoting without attribution:

Sons and daughters of graduates make up 10% to 15% of students at most Ivy League schools and enjoy sharply higher rates of acceptance. Harvard accepts 40% of legacy applicants, compared with an 11% overall acceptance rate. Princeton took 35% of alumni children who applied last year, and 11% of overall applicants. The University of Pennsylvania accepts 41% of legacy applicants, compared with 21% overall.

At Notre Dame, about 23% of all students are children of graduates.

…

Although universities have always paid special attention to their alumni, the legacy preference was formalized early last century, in some cases partly to limit enrollment of Jews. Today, the practice often has that effect on other groups. At the University of Virginia, 91% of legacy applicants accepted on an early-decision basis for next fall are white; 1.6% are black, 0.5% are Hispanic, and 1.6% are Asian. Among applicants with no alumni parents, the pool of those accepted is more diverse: 73% white, 5.6% black, 9.3% Asian and 3.5% Hispanic.

and this woodnote wild from the Michigan case:

One of those students, Patrick Hamacher, was turned down by Michigan despite having a legacy preference. An earlier version of Michigan’s legacy preference had boosted his 2.9 high-school grade-point average to 3 for purposes of considering him. The suit that he and co-plaintiff Jennifer Gratz filed asks for the elimination of race as a factor in admissions at the university. But Mr. Hamacher says he actually doesn’t think Michigan should consider either race or parentage in its admissions. He is now a graduate of another university, Michigan State.

Julia says:

So the student who’s suing was willing to get in ahead of more qualified applicants. Funny we didn’t hear that earlier…

The average SAT of legacies admitted at Harvard is two points lower than that of the average student admitted which number includes the legacies?

Take out the legacy scores from the average and tell me how the average legacy stacks up to that number.

Better yet, let’s talk mean scores.

Better yet, how about Mr. Buckley go back to the Dartmouth Review where his kind of reasoning is more at home.

He has always been a liar. Now, he has virtually everything he’s ever wanted but he just can’t stop himself. It’s embedded in the DNA.

UPDATE: Ampersand has a very instructive analysis about how many and which whites are rejected because of affirmative action.