No, They Shouldn't

AS AN ELITE SCHOOL, Dartmouth has the responsibility of admitting the best and the brightest. The legacy should be made to sink or swim in that pool. This is a country founded on the principle that people should not inherit their position in society. Colleges make understand able attempts to reach out to the historically underprivileged, or to students whose character or talents would add something to the campus. Oh, sure, our (hopelessly misguided) alter ego claims above that children of alumni have some mystic awareness of the school's character. In reality, legacies help form a campus core of knee-jerk traditionalists who reminisce about a school that never really existed, except in the time-obscured memory of their forebears.

At any rate, colleges don't admit the children of alumni because of what they bring to the campus but rather what their parents bring to the campus namely, funds. The policy is a cynical, albeit successful, attempt to shake a richly fruitful family tree. Legacy preference is a sop to alumni, a way to keep them, in the famous words of a former football coach at Yale, "sullen but not mutinous."

Enough, already. Dartmouth and its fellow elite colleges should start thinking more about serving society and less about serving themselves.