> I don't recall anyone promising anyone else a perfectly even playing field down to the most minuscule detail.

Neither do I but that doesn't mean that we should make trivial changes to even the playing field where possible. Especially when that trivial change is just to stop doing something that is very obviously unfair.

At this point I'm guessing you or your children benefited from the legacy system and don't want to feel guilty about it because I can't really imagine any other reason to defend the system. It's very obviously unfair, and there is very obviously no good reason to keep it (other than money of course).

> people arguing against the rate of legacy admissions haven't a leg to stand on without first controlling for obvious variables.

You don't need to do any statistical analysis to prove it has an effect to know that it is unfair. Like, if you took fair dice and then sanded one side slightly, you don't need to actually do any actual analysis to know that you shouldn't do that because there are no possible good effects and one possible bad effect.

This is typically what legacy admits tell themselves to cope with the fact that they do not deserve to be there. But it has no relation to reality. With the data that Harvard tried so desperately to hide, we can confidently dismiss these false claims

You were the one who started suggesting that "legacy" was "woke", which you are not. Now you seem to have switched to defending it.

Legacy isn't fairness "down to the most minuscule detail" it is a significant part of admissions procedures, written into the rules. It would be reduce the complexity of admissions to simply throw out all legacy-related text. If it indeed provides no help to those legacy students, surely that's a win-win for everyone?

I actually disagree that the first is true, in and of itself. If you have two otherwise identical candidates except one is a Legacy candidate, then the answer is (tautologically) no, having a parent does not make you more qualified. But it's also true that that being a legacy gives that student an advantage, even if its limited to just getting put at the top of the pile to be reviewed. And if a segment of the population has been historically barred from attending these institutions, then I think it qualifies as an "unfair" advantage.

Calling it "systematic racism" may bring with it a lot of other cultural baggage at the moment, but I think fundamentally we can at least agree that Legacy Admissions are a way of preserving the status quo, in opposition to social mobility.