The Gold Standard | The legacy double standard

I’m about to tell you a gigantic secret that will blow the lid off the Penn community.

The University of Pennsylvania advantages legacies in admissions.

This policy isn’t popular in a variety of circles. A poll conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 75 percent of people oppose these legacy admissions.

While I do think that Penn should employ legacy admissions — relax, I have no legacy connection — the pressing issue is how Penn masquerades around with a two-faced sibling admissions policy.

Currently, a “legacy” is defined as an applicant who is “the child or grandchild of someone who has received a Penn degree,” per the Penn Alumni website. Pretty straightforward.

However, does this mean that younger siblings who eagerly checked the application decisions last Wednesday had no added benefit from their brothers or sisters’ positive experiences here at Penn?

Not exactly. Enter the second face of sibling admission policy. From the alumni website: “While having a sibling does not carry the same weight as a parent or grandparent in this sense, the relationship can still prove valuable.”

“Technically a legacy is the child or grandchild of a Penn alumnus/ae from any of Penn’s schools,” Dean of Admissions Eric Furda wrote in an email. “Siblings are not technically legacies. That does not mean that we don’t value/care that a sibling attended or currently attends. We do. But again, make it your own.”

It seems that sibling admissions have a half-legacy status at Penn — a sort of limbo. But our policy is still better than the ones at some peer schools, such as Stanford University. “We have no special preferences in our admission process for students who have siblings,” Shawn Abbott, Stanford’s director of admission, told The Stanford Daily.

Despite having a comparatively superior procedure to Stanford, we should still seek to improve this pseudo-legacy policy. Penn should have sibling legacy count just as much as parent or grandparent legacy would.

Colleges usually say the value in legacy admissions isn’t just for the money or financial benefits. It’s for that deeper connection that Furda referred to — that connection to a University family right outside of the nuclear family.

Siblings share an intrinsic bond, and giving them legacy status to attend school together achieves exactly the sort of valuable relationship that the admissions office genuinely seeks. A sibling legacy policy is important — perhaps more so than the parental one — because it allows family members close in age to grow together at the same institution and carry these shared values with them through adulthood.

College freshman Andrew Spelman, who is a triplet and was admitted last year with his brothers David and Will, emphasized this sentiment. “Having a sibling with you at school provides a support system during a time of new experiences,” he said. “[It also] gives us a shared and unique bond that we would of otherwise not had by attending separate schools.”

The institutional tie fostered among siblings is bound to become more resolute than the one that spans multiple generations. There are simply more years available for the appreciation of a shared collegiate experience. And that, in essence, is why sibling legacies should be granted the full status of parent or grandparent legacies.

Legacy should not be about exploiting the successes of older relatives with whom time shared is irrefutably shorter. or nonexistent, as in the case of deceased grandparents.

The Admissions Office has done a praiseworthy job in the last few years. Look no further than the record 31,659 applications submitted for a spot in the Class of 2015.

However, there exists this inequity in the admissions process that downplays the very values the admissions office and the University of Pennsylvania claim to cherish.

Brian Goldman is a College junior from Queens, N.Y. His email address is goldman@theDP.com. The Gold Standard appears every Monday.

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