Monday, March 31, was an important day in the life of our university. It was the day that we invited a new generation of Blue Devils to join our Duke family. This incoming class is sure to be as brilliant and accomplished as it is diverse, bringing together students from every corner of the globe and every walk of life. It will include first-generation college students and students from low-income backgrounds who are stepping onto a campus like this for the first time. It will also include students from immense wealth who represent the latest in a long line of Blue Devils in their families. These latter students are often grouped under a single, increasingly controversial label: “legacy”.
At Duke and other elite universities around the country, “legacy” has become a loaded word. In conversations about admissions equality, legacy students are often discussed as symbols of elitism: beneficiaries of generational privilege who take spots from more deserving applicants. This kind of criticism is not without merit. But in our haste to condemn legacy admissions, we have distorted the term into something it was never supposed to mean.
To understand why, it helps to start with how Duke and other elite universities actually build their incoming classes. Admissions committees are not simply trying to assemble the highest possible average SAT score. They are trying to build a community of roughly 1,700 students who will live, study, and grow together over four years. That means practicing a form of holistic admissions that finds value in students who exemplify different kinds of excellence and different kinds of contribution to university life. A class made up solely of the highest academic achievers who are selected without regard to background, connection, or communal contribution might look impressive on paper. But that class might also be fragmented, competitive to the point of isolation, and lacking any shared identity. Community is not built solely on academic metrics: it is something universities must intentionally cultivate by examining the whole of each applicant…