Affirmative action has largely lost the support of the public, given that it doesn't accomplish much in the way of equality for black people, and it's led to a lot of discrimination against Asian-Americans.

It's still around in the fancy colleges, though, and now Harvard University has found itself under legal scrutiny from the Supreme Court for its affirmative action admissions practices.

This has prompted New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott to ask an important question: if the affirmative action case is going to bring a lot of discovery as to Harvard's admissions practices, why shouldn't that discovery also put Harvard's rampant legacy admissions in the spotlight?  If anything, that practice is even more nefarious.

She writes:

A decision could come anytime between now and June 30, and many legal analysts expect the conservative-majority court will overturn race-conscious admissions practices.

It would be a consequential and disruptive decision that, in my view, would represent a victory for fairness in the application process.

But it would only do part of the job of making college admissions truly fair: The next behemoth that should be tackled is nepotism.

Thanks to the Supreme Court case, Harvard had to hand over troves of internal data about how they craft their classes. And, when you pull back the curtain on that infamously cutthroat and opaque admissions process, you find rampant backdoors into Harvard.

The stats on that, which are known as "legacy admissions," or the admissions of mostly white people who get into the prestigious university because they had a parent who went to the school, or who had a parent who gave a lot of cash to the school, or who had a parent who was employed as faculty or staff at the school, are truly nasty.

In fact, the [National Bureau of Economic Research] researchers found that 43% of white students at Harvard were either legacies, children of faculty, kin of donors, or a recruited athlete. And a staggering 75% of them wouldn't have gotten in if not for that special status.

The stats are so bad that it makes one look askance next time one sees a white Ivy League grad preening and posturing about wokery in the name of equality.  Did Trent or Biff really get in on his brains, or did he get in on his daddy's legacy?  Did Chelsea Clinton and Hunter Biden get into their schools on brains, or...well, we all know the answer to that one.

The bottom line here is that they perpetuate an entitled, arrogant, and indolent "elite" instead of a true meritocracy.  No wonder they are woke. 

Since so many of these legacy admits are whites, they clog up the "white" slots in the class assembly process, leaving far fewer slots for whites with no such incomes or connections in the bean-counting scheme.  A white with no connections through the legacy gateway has a microscopic chance of being admitted to any top Ivy League institution, no matter how hard he's worked and how well he's done because of the legacy admits. 

There are other problems with the practice, too.  Sometimes people who've been admitted on color grounds can't do the work, and admitting them is cruelly setting them up for failure.

Meanwhile, other slots slated for minorities are filled by people who do have merit but may not actually be from the oppressed groups the practice was supposed to lift up.  Recent immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America have scarfed up these slots, leaving ordinary African Americans on the outs.  Fake Indians, such as Elizabeth Warren, have corrupted the process further by pretending to be Indians in order to get their slots, too, muscling out actual Native American applicants.  And most annoying of all, light-skinned Latin American elites, who actively oppress the dark-skinned locals back home, have a field day being admitted as oppressed Hispanics through affirmative action.  Yeah, sure.

Things like this will give the Supreme Court a good chance of ruling against the counter-equality practice, which offends all sense of fairness.  But as Schlott writes, they should not stop there.  Legacy admissions have got to go, too — if anything, even faster.

Image: Picryl, public domain.