To the Editor:

Re “End the College Legacy Spoils System” (editorial, Sept. 8):

The call to end legacy admissions is a smokescreen, and neither necessary nor sufficient to improve higher education’s contribution to economic and social mobility.

America’s well-resourced colleges practicing legacy admissions should allocate greater resources to need-based financial aid, and recruit and admit those talented students who need it. These students are out there. That means either taking fewer higher-income students, wherever their parents went to college, or increasing the size of entering classes to make room for a more socioeconomically diverse and deserving student body. That would contribute most to the public good.

Catharine B. Hill

New York

The writer, former president of Vassar College, is managing director of Ithaka S + R, which offers strategic advice for academic and cultural institutions.

To the Editor:

In 1947, when I was a senior at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, I thought that the legacy system was just a way of keeping me out of the Ivy League. But to my surprise (and Midwood’s), I was admitted.