A powerful legacy

Call it ironic, call it fitting, but above all call it honorable: Thanks in no small part to a massive gift from a billionaire alumnus, an elite private university has done away with legacy preferences for children of alumni. No more will already privileged sons and daughters get a substantial leg up on getting into a selective institution of higher education.

The university is Johns Hopkins and the alum is Mike Bloomberg, class of 1964.

This is 2020, when educated Americans are supposed to care a great deal about inequality of opportunity. Yet most coveted colleges — the likes of Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown and Notre Dame — continue to bend over backward to let in the children of adults who already attended, claiming it’s a valuable way to strengthen ties to the university community and maybe, cough cough, encourage donations along the way.

At Harvard, legacy applicants are five times as likely to be admitted as non-legacies, according to one analysis. At Princeton, the ratio is four to one. Giving an inside track to kids who invariably had many other advantages to begin with is morally indefensible.

Hopkins’ gradual move away from legacies, which is now complete, has paid dividends in diversifying the Baltimore campus. A decade ago, just 9% of students had family income low enough to be eligible for Pell grants. The number today is more than double that.

Alongside other legacy-shunning institutions MIT and Cal Tech, Hopkins is becoming what colleges are meant to be: accelerators of mobility, not finishing schools for the already fortunate.