Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2012

4-year-old, “That’s mommy’s school.
That’s where you’re going to go.”
But last fall, I began to question the
robotic way we speak about a Carolina
education around our house — our fool-
hardy speech of inevitability — when I sat
at a table in Steve Farmer’s office, and he
told me a story. Farmer, UNC’s vice
provost for enrollment and undergraduate
admissions, has seen a great deal of emo-
tion around this table, a circular path of
anxieties and hopes traveled by alumni des-
perate for their children to attend their
alma mater, some of them shattered that
they would not be doing so. None was
more heartbreaking than this one:
“Sitting right there,” he said, pointing
to my seat, “was a dad who basically just
chewed out his son in front of me for not
doing well enough in school to get into
Carolina. The dad said it was his dream
that his son would go to Carolina, and he
had been living that dream his whole adult
life. And he looked his son in the eyes and
said, ‘We would not be here having this
conversation if it weren’t for this knuckle-
head right here.’ And knucklehead was the
word he used to describe his boy, sitting
right in front of us. It was terrible for the
child. It was awful.”
The reality is this: I could play the
phrase, “That’s mommy’s school. That’s where
you’re going to go,” on a loop over a track
of Hark the Sound while our daughters
sleep from now until their senior year of
high school, but I would be the knuckle-
head sitting at the table. I would be foolish
to assume that, just because Carolina
admitted 56 percent of alumni children —
so-called legacy students — who applied
last year, my children will one day count
themselves among such a group. And so as
I sat around the sometime table of doom
with Farmer and we chatted about UNC’s
legacy policy in admissions and what it
means to alumni, I realized two things: A
decade from now, I wouldn’t mind if my
daughters got a leg up in the admission
process because of me. And deep down,
I’m not convinced that they should.

Alumni some, taxpayers all

The naked numbers will tell you that
UNC received 23,753 applications for
admission last year (note that Farmer reck-
ons 80 to 85 percent of them are “fully
capable of thriving” at UNC) and accepted
only 31. 4 percent of them. They’ll tell you
that 62 percent of children of alumni living
in North Carolina were accepted, while half
of non-alumni residents were. They’ll show
that 42 percent of legacy applicants from
out-of-state — 245 out of 579 — gained
admission, compared with 18 percent of
non-legacy, nonresident candidates. (The
trend line on those figures has not moved
significantly in the past decade-plus.)

But when you dress the numbers with admissions-office language, that 62 percent isn’t the gift to multigenerational resident Tar Heels that you might think. In fact, the University policy on employing legacy status is silent when it comes to North Carolinians, Farmer said. No language appears that directs his staff to consider children of alumni differently from other in-state applicants.