[tzs]

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume all legacy admissions are white males, and that the diversity they claim to promote is racial and gender diversity.

> Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity

That's only true if the number of white males that would be admitted in a fully diverse class is not large enough to accommodate all the legacy admissions. I suspect that this is not the case, and so legacy admissions are essentially orthogonal to diversity considerations.

Dropping the assumptions stated in the first paragraph, the above argument remains correct as long as each category considered for diversity analysis has more admissions than the number of legacy admissions in that category.

[rspeer]

I am not sure where you're even going with this. It's like you're trying to have a different argument about privilege. Harvard-educated people don't have more male children.

Making sure that Harvard students keep coming from the same families is, quite directly, the opposite of diversity. You don't have to count white males to see that Harvard keeps being shaped by the same group of people.

This is classism, in particular. Of course class is correlated with race, but even if it weren't, this would be fucked up.

[tzs]

Usually when organizations have diversity programs and goals, it is racial or pseudo-racial diversity they are talking about, or gender diversity, or both of those.

To achieve such goals, for every 1000 students a school should have about 127 black students, 178 Hispanic students, 613 white non-Hispanic students, 48 Asians, and 34 others.

About 290 of every 1000 Harvard students are legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are overwhelmingly white.

My point was that Harvard can admit those 290 legacy students without affecting its racial diversity easily, because fully diverse Harvard would have 613 non-Hispanic white students per 1000 students. They could arrange that every legacy admission who would not have made it but for being legacy displaces another non-Hispanic white student, so had no affect on racial diversity.

I would not be at all surprised if among the white applicants Harvard has enough from each income level that they could even make it so each legacy admission that would not have made it if not legacy is displacing a non-legacy who is white and in the same income range.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Additionally, if a school admits an increasingly diverse mix over time, this should should impact the legacy admissions to become more diverse over time.

[rspeer]

The legacy admissions will create a dampening effect on diversity, averaging it out with whatever it was 30 years ago.