Elite US universities should scrap their policy of offering preferential admissions to the “legacy” children of alumni, as well as to athletes and the families of donors and faculty, according to Harvard’s former president.
Derek Bok, Harvard’s longest-serving living president, who ran the university from 1971 to 1991 and again from 2006 to 2007, told the Financial Times: “Letting in people because their parents are rich and might make a substantial contribution is wrong. It’s more necessary than ever to adapt the system to focus on academic ability not extraneous reasons.”
His comments will add to pressure on Ivy League colleges to reform preferential admissions, which a lawsuit before the Supreme Court last year revealed accounted for about 30 per cent of Harvard’s undergraduate intake. The policy is not used by its prestigious neighbour MIT, but has so far only been abandoned by a handful of other leading colleges including Johns Hopkins.