> "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately." > Few people would think tha

> "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, my dad is a cardiologist so he saw me immediately." > Few people would think that this action should be illegal. > Compared with: > "I need to see a cardiologist, but there's a long waiting list. Fortunately, I'm White, so he saw me immediately." > (notice how it's still distasteful even if we replace White with Black, Asian, or whatever). > So there's real reasons why we would allow a private institution to have legacy admissions but not race-based admissions (and...come on. Only in the USA would that sentence be controversial!). The relationship between a cardiologist and their child is fundamentally different than that between an educational institution, their alumnus, and the alumnus's child. The former is a nuclear familial relationship and the treatment is comparable to feeding one's own child. The latter is an institutional relationship that gives preferred access to a rarified privilege (attending an Ivy league university), not a basic need like medical treatment. Therefore you can't use the example of the parent/child doctor/patient relationship to justify legacy admissions.