If someone donates to a university with the understanding that his kids will get preferential treatment...whether the understanding is explicit or is a wink-wink-nudge-nudge...then he is receiving services in exchange for the contribution and it should not be tax deductible, at least not fully tax deductible. I believe there was some congressional discussion of this a couple of years ago, but don't know that anything came of it.

It's a good thing we socked it to those poor black kids first. Now we can clear our Nixon Library Giftshop day planners and make time to address all these over-privileged kids who make a mockery of the principles of democracy.

Likewise, I'm glad we're all fretting about how universities oppress the military. Because, you know, the military is such a victim, what with the mere 50% of my tax money they receive. (Why not make it 100%?) And once the poor military gets some respect, then maybe we can turn our attention to the gay dudes and dudettes who aren't allowed to serve their country.

It's all about priorities. That's what my father used to tell me, in his spare time between laying off the workers and swimming through his giant swimming pool full of greenbacks.

"setting a standard right now in offering tuition forgiveness".

Yes, the upper middle class or lower upper class has managed to use Congress to get the rich universities into giving it away free. Which means they must be laughing uproariously at their good fortune in being subjected to such "bullying". They now have a license to consolidate even more of their monopoly on the best and the brightest. Your parents make $75K, you get a free ride to Harvard, if you are blessed enough to get in. Your parents make $75K, you pay full freight at Kansas. The cognitive elite get even more of a send-off into life. Now the upper middle class elite are entitled to free or almost free education at Harvard. Way to go.

If this is "setting a standard", let us hope no new standards will be set for a while.

What about athletic scholarships? Those given to individuals who would not be accepted on academic merit? Why set seats aside for them? How is this different from setting seats aside for legacies or racial minorities? None of these individuals, in any of these groups, would get in on the basis of academic merit. If university admission is to be democratic, all seats must be awarded on the basis of academic merit. If athletes are admitted on that basis, then go on to represent the university on the field of play, they should be rewarded. Particularly gifted athletes, in major programs, should be rewarded generously with scholarships, or, IMO (to the horror of the NCAA) even cash. They’re making a substantial contribution to the university and should be compensated. However, they should not be given a seat in the first place if they do not qualify on the basis of academic merit-no matter how skilled they are as athletes.

Luther, the military is about 20% of the federal budget, not 50%, and that 20% includes retiree pay.

Is anyone aware of the share of descendants of alumni who would be admitted under common and garden standards? I have seen in print the contention that in excess of three-quarters of such candidates would actually be admitted under the usual standards. When people refer to 'legacy admissions' are they referring to the total population of legacies or merely the subpopulation for whom standards were relaxed?

If my own experience as a student is any guide, legacies do not form an identifiable subculture within an institution. It beggars belief that they would be a segment of the student population with which faculty members would feel any particular sympathy or whose performance would affect the faculty member's conception of himself. So the question arises, do legacy admissions generate a quantum of anti-academic peer pressure equivalent to that attributable to race-preference schemes?; do such programs have an equivalent effect on faculty members' calibration of the pacing and rigor of their courses?; are their academic programs set up to cater to legacies? Are admissions officers enthusiastic about these preferences as they are about other preferences? Is it not possible that the programs, while unfair, have a less malignant effect on the institutions' fulfillment of its mission?

Side note to Luther Blissett: Military expenditure has varied between 3% and 7% of gross domestic product over the last 35 years; that would be between 9% and 20% of public expenditure in toto. Even if it were higher it would not justify the practice of institutions treating soldiers as untouchables. Harvard is not a Mennonite school and cannot reasonably argue it is living out its vocation by prohibiting their presence.

Art, no one is treating our men and women in uniform as untouchables. There's a big difference between not allowing military recruiters to recruit on campus and forming a caste of men and women to sweep the dung in the street.

And yes, when I was teaching university classes, I came across several legacy children who couldn't perform at the level of their peers in my freshman writing classes. I also knew several legacy children in high school who got into universities above their merit. (They were Rutgers students going to Ivies. Then again Rutgers has a better faculty than many Ivy League joints.)

You have to look at where your federal tax money is really going. In 2009's $2650 billion budget for federal funds raised through income tax (which does not include Social Security and other trust funds), $653 billion go to the Department of Defense; $150 billion go to the military activities of other departments; $162 billion are swallowed up by what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will really cost us; while nearly $500 billion will go to "past military" costs, such as benefits for veterans and 80% of the interest on debt for military borrowing. That's 54% of the federal funds raised. Even if the military portion of the national debt were more conservatively estimated, we'd be at or around 50%.

In 2000 dollars, the 2006 GDP was $13,247 billion. Real increase in 2007 was 2.2%. The Fed estimates the increase in 2008 at 1.8%. Military spending seems to me about 1/10 of the GDP.

Adding the Deparment of Defense budget to spending on nukes, we see the US spending more than the combined outlay of the next 15 countries on the list of military budgets.

I don't mean to try to hijack this thread, but Luther's numbers on military/security spending are so far off as to be noteworthy. According the official OMB website for 2008 (www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/summarytables.html):

Discretionary security is 658B, discretionary nonsecurity is 456B, mandatory & interest is 1788B, for a total of 2902B.

Mandatory is SS, Medicare & Medicaid, SCHIP, etc.

Security (including ret. pay) is thus 22.7% of the budget for this year.

Please note also that a third of public revenues collected repair to state and local governments, who have scant role in military expenditure.

To refuse to allow military recruiters on campus is to treat them as untouchables, and to treat the institution they represent as untouchable.

Doug -- The government representation of the budget misrepresents the relationship between money raised by taxes and money spent. As The War Resisters League website argues, "[The government pie chart] is a distortion of how our income tax dollars are spent because it includes Trust Funds (e.g., Social Security), and the expenses of past military spending are not distinguished from nonmilitary spending."

See http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm for a revised pie chart that corrects the trust fund distortion (which began during Vietnam to misrepresent the cost of that war); takes into account probable requests for additional war money because Bush miserably underestimates the costs; deals with the percentage of interest payments based on loans for military-related purposes; etc.

Art: universities often have a general policy of not dealing with organizations or businesses that refuse to hire people based on things like sexuality. It's not to treat anyone as untouchable, which again is a metaphysical/religious concept.

My last post on this, because I chose to believe the OMB rather than an obscure, obviously agenda driven website called warresisters.org. That name should tell you all you need to know about its objectivity.

Doug, it's a fairly common critique of the government pie chart. They include Trust Fund spending, even though those funds do not come out of federal income taxes. This makes spending look more in touch with the nation's social priorities than the real priorities that define how federal tax funds are allocated.

It's also completely fair to estimate what percentage of the loan payments goes to pay off loans taken for things like the War in Iraq. Or what percentage of domestic social spending is going to the costs of past military action -- veteran health care and so on.

Finally, Bush has proven that he underbudgets for his wars while demanding money later. That must be taken into account.

I don't think these are terribly unobjective criticisms of the official pie chart.

LB's posts reflect an all-too-common faculty-borne anti-military prejudice often not widely shared by general student bodies at colleges and universities.

After representatives of top university law schools went down to dusty (i.e., unanimous) defeat in 2006 in challenging the Solomon Amendment (allowing the federal government to deny grant funding to institutions barring military recruiters from equal access to campuses), I suspect they'll shift tactics in their anti-military crusade.

I agree with Erin O'Connor that legacy admissions policies are ripe for rescission, as are athletic scholarship programs.

Dr. DeLater: Questioning the US military's discrimination against gays and lesbians is not an anti-military position. Having had lunch with an Army soldier and dinner with a Naval officer and former Marine this week, I can safely attest that by your own standards, our military would be anti-military.

Colleges should have the right to take a principled stand against working with organizations and businesses that discriminate and that, in discriminating, break the laws established in the Constitution.

Bush's ill-planned war in Iraq has done more to damage our nation's military than anything done by our universities.

LB: There are ample on-campus opportunities for anti-discrimination reformers, e.g., racial preferences in admissions, racially segregated dorms and lounges as well as the indefensible legacy admissions policies and athletic scholarship programs referred to above.

Like many anti-war, anti-administration, and anti-military partisans, LB shifts easily from the smokescreen of discrimination claims against the US military to questionable military-related cost claims. A further indication of this shift is how this discussion of inequitable college admissions policies became a forum for LB's attacks on the military, the war in Iraq, and the Bush administration.

LB...given that we have civilian control of the military in this country, these policies are established by Congress and/or the Executive branch. To be intellectually consistent, the universities would have to ban all on-campus interviews for Congressional or Presidential job/internships.

Doug, David, Art:
LB has a habit of responding to a posts here and going way off topic to go after the Bush Regime or some other leftist / cry baby college boy target. The post was about legacies, wasn't it? And not about the military's budget and the illegal war. Right? Not much point in responding to him because he doesn't want to talk about the topic at hand or make logical arguments. BTW: LB sounds a heck of a lot like a reggae dude who once regularly commented here.

I can think of a handful of situations in which legacy preferences can at least be defended with a straight face:
*The tie-breaker: when you have 1,000 qualified applicants, 5 seats, and no way to meaningfully distinguish them, why not give those five seats to the kids who are more likely to enjoy the experience and become active alums? (This all assumes that legacies have more ties to the school and will emulate their parents after graduation, but, anecdotally, those things hold true.)
*The super-wealthy donor who finances the educations for brilliant, qualified people who otherwise could not afford it, or endows chairs at the school, etc. In this case, the student body may benefit more by having the legacy there (and the associated benefits) than by having a person with slightly higher SATs take the seat.
*As the people who went to college in the 1970s are now old enough to have kids who are applying to college, we should be cognizant of the fact that we don't want to start complaining about legacy admissions at the time when minorities may first benefit from them. In coming years, legacy admissions will be race-blind, in theory, as the pool of potential legacy admits becomes racially diverse.
*Legacy admits of very active alums who are in the administration: this can give the administration some wonderful insight into how students at the school enjoy their experience, learn, utilise extra-curricular offerings, etc. (This will happen once every five or ten years, maybe.)

Beyond that, the practise is entirely silly. Even in some of the above circumstances, the student should have made some mention (perhaps in a cover letter or a "Why This College" essay) of why the legacy admission preference would make sense.

There are a variety of non-merit based admissions preferences; affirmative action is but one of them. To improve town-gown relations, many schools preferentially admit the students from the local school system. Students who are not from the area, or from high-achieving areas that are overrepresented at the school, will often receive preferences. (If you have kids, move to South Dakota during their junior year.) Various non-academic activities - athletics, musical talent - also play a role, for better or for worse. At many schools, especially elite liberal arts institutions, boys are favoured in admissions.

There is no such thing as purely academic-merit admissions. The issue is really the nature, scope, and effect of the various preferences.

theobromophile makes some valid points, such as the "tie breaker" scenario, but his assertion that "there is no such thing as purely academic-merit" is false. Many students, both historically and in present times, have earned admission to colleges purely on academic merit.

As the second person here actually to comment about legacies, I feel safe that I didn't go off topic. Doug challenged one point I made about the budget (which was part of a larger point about priorities), and I responded. DeLater then made an ad hominem attack on me, to which I responded. Both sought to address subsidiary points and not my main point about conservative priorities (e.g., attack affirmative action before getting around to legacies).

Tom G, your own ad hominem attack on me is, uh, off topic. Pots, kettles, anyone?

Let me rephrase: there isn't a school in the country that currently admits its students based solely upon academic merit. There is always an element of building a class, placating alums, and ensuring that there is enough money coming in the door to maintain operations.

By the way, I'm a woman. "theobromophile" = chocolate lover. Now, Tom, if you know anything about the fairer sex, "chocolate addict" shouldn't come as a surprise. :)

Sorry about that, theobromophile. I never would have figured that one out, but I learned something new today. So thanks! However, we're just going to have to agree to disagree about the admissions thing. I believe there are many schools that admit students on the basis of academic merit - maybe not all of them, but some.