It’s Not Massachusetts’ Job to End Legacy Admissions. It’s Harvard’s.

As the debate over legacy preferences in college admissions continues to rage, I find myself opposed to recent efforts by state lawmakers to ban the practice — but not because I believe legacy admissions is right.

I understand Harvard’s goal of maintaining alumni engagement and monetary donations through a legacy boost in admissions. I also sympathize with the arguments that giving a leg up to an applicant based on where their parents went to school flies in the face of truly meritocratic admissions — much like systematically devaluing Asian applicants’ personality scores.

While I don’t care what decision is reached on legacy preferences, I do care who makes that decision — and the correct answer certainly isn’t Massachusetts legislators. Decisions about admissions are unquestionably Harvard’s to make. No state should interfere with the core functions of a private university simply because they don’t like how it chooses to operate.

We should not write a blank check for institutions to operate without legal oversight. For example, anti-discrimination laws — long the crux of debates surrounding college admissions — should remain well within lawmakers’ scope. Legacy admissions, though, falls far short of justifying legislative intervention.

There are two primary strains of opposition to legacy. The classic argument is that it makes the admissions process less meritocratic. Kids whose parents went to Harvard already have a leg up. There’s no reason to put another finger on the scale.

More recently, adversaries have claimed that in a post-affirmative action world, one of the ways to maintain diversity would be to let the practice go. But in the first admissions cycle since the curtailing of affirmative action, the alarmists were proved staggeringly incorrect: The enrollment of minority students on Harvard’s campus remained relatively stable. The sky did not fall. Harvard has proved itself capable of maintaining a diverse student body while continuing to practice legacy admissions.

In either case, it’s clear that, however commendable, these goals are not of such urgency that state or national governments may rightly arrogate to themselves the power to determine admissions criteria. Countenancing such overreach risks opening the door to more and more interference with college admissions practices.

For example, athletic applicants are routinely held to a much lower academic standard in the admissions process. Might legislators soon see fit to place quotas on the number of athletes a school admits? In fact, an outright ban on athletic preferences in admissions might end collegiate athletics as we know it.

What about the children of major donors? Should the children of those people whose donations fund tuition, resources, and opportunities for so many of us truly receive no additional consideration in the admissions process?

If such situations sound ludicrous, it’s because they are. Obviously government officials should not usurp the admissions professionals and administrators who know best what’s the needs of their school. Existing admissions practices, including athlete and donor preferences, balance a complex matrix of needs and incentives. It’s fair game to call on colleges to find a different balance, but to directly intervene ignores that colleges themselves are best-placed to ensure their continued prosperity.

Some might argue that this reasoning implies the Supreme Court was wrong to evaluate the University’s program of affirmative action. But the two situations are clearly distinct. While the Supreme Court found that treating applicants differently based on their race violates the principles of equal protection found in the Constitution, the same can’t be said of legacy preferences, which may have racially disparate impacts but are plainly not discriminatory.

Government should not wrest decisions about admissions practices from the hands of universities. Maybe legacy admissions should go — but Massachusetts legislators can’t be the ones to do it.

Henry P. Moss IV ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a History concentrator in Eliot House.