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Before he stepped into his new job as Harvard College dean in July, David J. Deming was a vocal scholar of elite institutions’ admissions processes, investigating how legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and testing policies benefit wealthier students in admission to Ivy League schools like Harvard.

But Deming — leading admissions expert turned undergraduate administrator — has given no indication that he will apply his expertise in advising Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 while serving as College dean.

Deming declined to comment on whether he would play a role in the College’s admissions process. Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson James M. Chisholm also declined to comment on Deming’s involvement and wrote in a statement that Fitzsimmons will continue to report directly to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra.

But as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Graduate School of Education, Deming became a leading voice on how to create equal opportunities for applicants to top universities, especially as calls to overhaul Harvard’s admissions practices intensified after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action.

Documents released in the lawsuit — filed by anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions — detailed the extent of Harvard’s preference for legacy applicants, athletes, and children of Harvard employees, leading to a wave of backlash from lawmakers and politicians in Washington, D.C.

Since then, several states across the country have passed bills intended to ban legacy admissions — Massachusetts has been a notable exception — and recent incoming Harvard classes have consistently reported an unfavorable outlook on legacy admissions in The Crimson’s annual survey of freshmen.

Without a concrete mandate, Harvard has neither announced nor publicly indicated that it plans to get rid of its skew toward legacy applicants and athletes. And while Deming has advocated for changes to Ivy League admissions practices, his scholarship does not recommend a ban on legacy admissions.

Deming, an economist who studies social mobility, economic inequality, and the labor market, specializes in researching the effects of higher education. His team’s studies have shown that the effect of banning legacy admissions would lead to a similarly wealthy class of admitted students — only with fewer family ties.

In a study published in July 2023, Deming and his co-authors — Raj Chetty ’00 and John N. Friedman ’02, economics professors at Harvard and Brown University — found that when applicants from the top 1 percent of family incomes have comparable standardized test scores to those from low-income families, Ivy-plus colleges are almost twice as likely to admit the wealthier candidate.

The discrepancy, they wrote, could be attributed to three factors: legacy admissions, “non-academic” factors such as extracurriculars or leadership capacity, and athletic recruitment — all of which tip the scales in favor of the wealthiest students who can afford to boost those aspects of their application.

Months later, Deming discussed the implications of his research in the Atlantic. He labeled the preference for legacy applicants as representative of “unearned intergenerational privilege,” but wrote that abolishing it would not level the playing field at schools like Harvard.

If legacy admissions were banned, he argued, elite institutions would merely supplant rich legacy applicants with rich non-legacy applicants — who still have disproportionate opportunities to become a recruited athlete or maintain stronger extracurriculars. In other words, the makeup of classes would not meaningfully change.

Instead, Deming called for greater transparency and accountability among the nation’s elite institutions in order to achieve progress on economic diversity across campuses. He wrote that the Department of Education should require applicants to report their family income on college applications, rather than only on financial aid documents.

“Better income data would ratchet up public pressure on highly selective colleges, whose leaders care deeply about their reputation,” he wrote, adding that substantive reform would only come if the public pressured selective universities into “valuing economic diversity as much as other forms of diversity.”

“That will make a much bigger difference than ending legacy admissions ever could,” Deming wrote.

In recent months, the Trump administration has increased reporting requirements for Harvard, along with all other American universities, requiring them to submit data illustrating that they do not consider race in admissions.

The White House has not directly focused on factors influencing the socioeconomic makeup of elite institutions, instead taking aim at schools that allegedly utilize “overt and hidden racial proxies” to consider race in admissions.

In addition to affirmative action reforms, Harvard College admissions has undergone a rare period of turbulence in response to sweeping test-optional policies during the Covid-19 pandemic. Harvard announced in April 2024 that it would reinstate its standardized testing requirement beginning with the Class of 2029, after four years of test-optional admissions.

In its press release, Harvard cited a study co-authored by Deming, which found that SAT scores were a strong predictor of academic success among undergraduates.

Deming has been a vocal proponent of requiring standardized testing for college applicants, and is strongly against applicants “super-scoring” — or combining section scores across sittings for a single, higher total — their results on the SAT or ACT.

Because students from wealthier families are more likely to retake the SAT or ACT than peers of lower-income backgrounds and thereby improve their scores, colleges ought to consider requiring applicants to submit every test score, Deming wrote.

Though Harvard’s admissions office does not compile a superscore for applicants, it evaluates an applicant’s highest test scores in sections across testing dates, according to the Harvard College admissions website.

Deming argued in a March 2024 Atlantic article that when colleges evaluate applicants in the absence of SAT or ACT scores, “the remaining measures used to assess applicants are even more biased.”

“The SAT and ACT aren’t perfect, but they are the best way to identify talented low-income students who can succeed at highly selective colleges,” he wrote. “Their universality is their virtue. To make college admissions more equitable, we should test more, not less.”

—Staff writer Cassidy M. Cheng can be reached at cassidy.cheng@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cassidy_cheng28.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.

—Staff writer Elias M. Valencia can be reached at elias.valencia@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @eliasmvalencia.