Meet the 10,000+ DoSomething Members Fighting to Make College Admissions More Fair

“Why should your parents’ accomplishments affect an application that is supposed to show what you yourself have accomplished? You can’t control where your parents went to college before you were even born.”

By now you’ve heard about the massive college admissions cheating scandal, featuring Aunt Becky and 50 others who lied, bribed, cheated, and did some otherwise ridiculous stuff to get their kids into top colleges.

The whole debacle has been for some spicy headlines, sure, but more importantly it’s highlighted a bigger issue that’s all too familiar for lots of students. Even if they’re not breaking the law, families with money can game the admissions system, while those without are left in the dust.

One way they do that? Through legacy and donor admissions preferences. Basically, lots of colleges are more likely to admit a student if their parents attended or donated serious shmoney to that school. It’s one reason that elite universities, more students come from the top 1% of the income scale than the bottom 60% combined.

“There is no reason as to why a school should give a priority to the children or grandchildren of people who studied at said school seeing as how it promotes wealthy people to get into schools more,” says Ilana, 18, DoSomething member. “Seeing as many minorities are first- or second-generation college students, they will rarely be legacy children and will have even lower chances of getting in.”

We asked, you spoke: only 7% of DoSomething members think that’s fair. That’s why over 10,000 of you have already signed a petition telling Ivy League schools to end legacy and donor preferences.

“I'm a prospective mechanical engineering student who thinks that admission should be based solely on essays, grade consistency or improvement, and demonstrated interest rather than how many millions of dollars the parents can ‘donate’ to the university,” another member says. “Legacy and donor preferences should be abandoned. This furthers the education gap as white, upper-class students are benefited further via these processes. We need diversity and we need fairness.”

Sign the petition. We’ll send your name directly to decision-makers to tell them you want admissions to be about merit, not money.