{shortcode-8f2105f889bc46c41b1ba3196be9496bb400fe1b}

There’s no doubting that Harvard’s legacy admissions system is detestable. But since administrators have shown little interest in scrapping it entirely, I say we make legacy bigger.

Hear me out: I propose a new criterion for legacy preference to supplement our current hereditary lottery. The University should establish a voluntary network of alumni mentors responsible for engaging promising high schoolers of historically underrepresented backgrounds. At the same time it should encourage mentors to cultivate Harvard’s values in those students.

Then give that cohort of applicants a leg up in admissions.

Our University’s unwavering preference for children of alumni undermines, in principle, the pursuit of excellence through meritocratic achievement and selectivity. That family association should privilege some applicants over others is, in the eyes of most students today, an affront against the very premise of Harvard — an institution reserved for those willing to earn their place here.

But as things stand today, the legacy boost is going nowhere.

Proponents of legacy preference have mounted an effective campaign in its defense — effective enough to sustain their model through the dawn of new admissions priorities such as diversity and inclusion. They desire a durable foundation of shared ideals and traditions for the University and claim that a preference for legacies is the best way to achieve that.

Think Harvard-Yale, Commencement, Housing Day. These are the timeless Harvard experiences that, ideally, complement a set of equally timeless virtues: education, scholarship, excellence.

It’s certainly a rosy picture.

Most charitably, legacy admissions foster cultural continuity across generations — a sturdy bridge with the alumni household as its keystone, where future Harvard students are reared by their parents to reproduce the same customs, value the same virtues, and enjoy the same social-environmental product.

Let’s be clear: Those goals are partially justified. Tradition, institutional character, and intergenerational collaboration all have value. But the bloodline privilege this institution has contrived to reach those ends is outmoded.

Let’s also be realistic: Harvard’s fundraising impulses — indulged in large part by wealthy alumni on the prowl for admissions boosts for their children — make the full demise of legacy preference a remote possibility.

So if legacy admissions are here to stay, why not retool the existing system by adding something meaningful, rational, and modern — a mentorship-based pathway that strengthens our values rather than undermines them?

We can fight — or at least temper — the stubborn, anti-meritocratic mischief of legacy admissions, reinventing them as an engine for inclusivity and mobility.

Here’s the model of a legacy-powered Harvard I envision:

Carve out an enhanced role for alumni in the social and academic upbringing of our student body. This University should seek a formal process whereby alumni mentorship of bright high school students of underrepresented backgrounds confers unto those students legacy admissions preference.

The College’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid should establish a program akin to their interviewer network — where a pool of qualified and eager alumni are formally selected to serve as mentors in their communities.

The University should then identify promising students through school administrator nomination and admissions-side evaluation and pair them with a volunteer alum from the same region.

For the duration of the program — spanning two years of a high schooler’s education — the College should enforce clear, effective, and realistic benchmarks for alum and mentee engagement, including a certain number of hours of academic consultation and a specified volume of college admissions advice.

These are the intangible perks afforded the children of alumni during their high school experience — and which Harvard, it seems, deems to be the makings of the ideal legacy candidate. We should apply the very same weight provided to traditional legacy students in the admissions process for those mentored students who engage fully and consistently with a program of this sort.

Harvard can and must do better.

We should be creating a system that orients alumni-enhanced admissions toward who and what Harvard can be — rather than solely what it was in their time or is today. Expansive, aspirational, mentorship-based legacy preference would enable precisely that. Harvard can model multigenerational collaboration, accountability, and exchange through pathways of support and interaction that extend beyond the family system.

A legacy bump predicated on mentorship underscores and perpetuates our institutional foundation: that we are a university of timeless ideas — and that foremost among those ideas are collaboration, growth, and achievement.

Of course, I want the next generation of this University to appreciate the same indelible features of a Harvard academic and social experience as I have.

But for the sake of a vibrant, living and breathing academy, I’d rather they not bear the same last names as myself and my peers. I’d rather they come from backgrounds far removed and more diverse. This is the reasoning that built a Harvard bigger than the Lowells and the Cabots.

My generation’s successors should share Harvard’s values — yes — but should add their own to them too.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House