Outline
Title: Elite Colleges, or Colleges for the Elite?
I. Introduction
a. Hook: Today’s populist moment allows for an opportune time to examine high education’s biggest affirmative action program, for the children of alumni.
b. Backround Infortmation: Legacys affect larger numbers of students than the number of minority students
c. Thesis: Alumni prefrences should be banned
i. “Unlike the issue of racial prefrences, advantages for alumni children- who are overwhelmingly white and weathly- have been the subject of little scholarship, no state voter initiates and no Supreme Court decisions.”
II. Point #1: Unfair advantage: How being an alumni gives you a greater chance of getting into a college.
a. Being a child of an alumnus adds the equivalent of 160 SAT points to one’s applicationàincreases chance of admission by 20%
b. Legacies make up 10-25% of student body
III. Point #2: Unsupported justification for the program
a. Accepting more alumni will sustain tradition and increase donations
i. 7 universites that dropped legacy prefrences, the alumni kept donating
IV. Point #3: Legal Action
a. The issue of legacy prefrences haven’t been properly litigated, could be illegal
b. Violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment
c. Also may violate the 1866 Civil rights Act
d. Controversial policies
i. Anti-discrimination: can’t classify by ancestry
ii. Anti-subordination: must address a brutal history of discrimination
V. Conclusion
a. Greater Meaning: Confress should outlaw almni prefrences at all universities and colleges receiving federal financing
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