Why is affirmative action OK for those with rich, college-educated parents?

After affirmative action was banned by the US Supreme Court last month, legacy admissions rightly resurfaced as a concern. After all, if universities aren’t to be allowed to preferentially admit students on the basis of their race, why should they still do so on the basis of who their parents are? But the issue is about more than that.

College admissions have become an unfair battle among parents more than a meritocratic competition among students. The children of parents who went to college not only have the advantage of legacy status, but also benefit from greater knowledge of the admissions system – and their preparation to succeed in that system can begin as early as middle school. 

As someone who used to work preparing students for elite college admissions, I have talked to parents who push their children to write books, enter various competitions and spend hours daily with tutors before they become teenagers – all to impress the admissions officers at Harvard and Stanford six years later. With college admissions consultancy today constituting a multibillion-dollar industry, the system rewards parental effort more than student effort. This is why I quit that job.

At my elite college, many of my peers attended private and feeder high schools, had personal tutors throughout and had ex-admissions officers as guidance counsellors or essay consultants. But I attended a high school that has historically sent only one person to an Ivy League school. And my parents, educated at an average college in India, were oblivious to what it took to get in. As a result, I did not know which the good schools were, never mind how to apply to them, until I did my own research in my senior year of high school. 

But it is almost always too late by then to begin thinking of college. For a chance at a good school, I had to take extra exams and spend hours daily to improve my essay writing during my full-time two-year military service in Singapore. If this was my experience as an international student, consider what life must be like for low-income Americans without college-educated parents, who have no choice but to attend under-staffed public schools.

It is hard to play the game when many others play by different rules. If universities are serious about admitting students fairly, they need to reward the tremendous effort required by some students to compensate for what other applicants’ parents do for them.

But what applicants’ parents do for them doesn’t just corrupt meritocracy in admissions. Parents are actually doing a disservice to their children by getting them into college. Doing all that work for them, relieving them of the need to adopt personal agency, is just another way to spoil them. It robs them of initiative and resilience. I and many others notice this of my generation: as Gen-Zer Zach Gottlieb recently put it in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Generation Z see any form of discomfort as a threat to their mental health. 

Worse still, over-enterprising parents take away the joy that comes with owning an accomplishment. Although it’s not common practice, I declared in my transfer application to the University of Chicago that I had had no outside help with it. I also pride myself on having scored in the 97th percentile in the International Baccalaureate programme in high school and the 99th percentile in the ACT and SAT subject tests solely by self-studying. I would not exchange that feeling for an even higher score with the help of tutors.

For the betterment of my generation, this is the kind of meritocracy we should cultivate. To reward student and not parental effort, admissions committees must rethink their applications and change the incentives they create.

In effect, affirmative action still routinely operates for legacy students, students from elite feeder high schools and students with wealthy parents. Supreme Court justices might be fine with that, but university presidents should not be.

Aman Majmudar, a senior at the University of Chicago.