Let alma maters decide

0 Comments | USA TODAY, August, 2008

A fair number of freshmen arriving at their colleges this week are legacies, a term that sounds faintly disreputable. Aren't these the students who get into top-tier colleges because their parents went there and donate heavily?

That's what the critics of admission preferences for children of alumni say, and those critics got a boost from research released earlier this month.

A paper by a Duke University sociology professor and a graduate student concluded that legacy students entered Duke with lower grades and had poorer grades the first year (before recovering). Not only did the Duke legacy students earn lower grades initially, they were more likely to be wealthy, white, Protestant graduates of private schools.

The study is bound to fire up...