Here is an uncomfortable truth about the world of highly selective college admissions1: there has never, ever been a time when the process was objectively fair (e.g. based entirely on academic merit2).
There have always been admissions preferences for and outright bans against certain types of students based on race, religion, gender. There are have also been quotas to limit the enrollment of some types of students and practices to try to increase the enrollment of others.
These days, selective institutions have done away with many obviously discriminatory practices and talk a good game about valuing diversity and wanting to provide opportunity to the “best and brightest”, including low income and other historically excluded populations. This is good, but the truth is that there are still some types of students that have an easier path to acceptance at institutions that say “no” more than they say “yes”. And, no, I’m not talking about affirmative action here.
As a reminder, in the summer of 2023, the Supreme Court (in a decision I felt was, to use technical language, REAL DUMB) ruled that race based affirmative action admissions structures at the University of North Carolina and Harvard were unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Right Act. This decision resulted in the elimination of admissions policies that gave some applicants additional consideration based on their self-reported race and ethnicity.
(Here’s where I should note that the vast majority of colleges and universities did not have affirmative action practices or policies in place at the time of this decision, so the number of colleges that had to change their admissions practices was comparatively small, likely 10% or less of four year colleges and universities in the US)
The decision, despite having a very limited impact on the field of college admissions as a whole, did generate a lot of conversation and debate about fairness in the highly selective admissions process. It also brought renewed attention to the kinds of preferential admissions practices that are still allowable in many states and practiced by some of the most selective colleges.
One of the most widespread forms of remaining preferential admissions practices is legacy admissions, which is sometimes jokingly (but not really) called “affirmative action for rich white kids”. This practice is now facing legal challenges of its own and might be the next big target for state and federal legislation of the admissions process, so let’s discuss!
What is Legacy Admissions?
Legacy admissions is a practice where applicants to a selective or highly selective schools are given extra “points”3 or a more favorable review in the admissions process because they are the child4 of an alumni of the institution. Sometimes this can also be a factor in awarding scholarships or institutional aid.
(If you’ve ever wondered why college applications ask a student if they’ve had a family member attend or work at the institution, this is why!)
Being a “legacy” can be a sizable advantage at some institutions, especially if the student is also an athlete, a child of a faculty member, or the relative of a regular donor to the college.
It is also an unearned advantage that is strongly correlated with wealth and social privilege.
What Kinds of Schools do Legacy Admissions?
Short answer: schools that say “no” more than they say “yes”
But you aren’t expecting me to give you a short answer, right?
According to research from the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), “nearly one third of all selective four-year institutions in the U.S. considered legacy status for first-time students”. Legacy admissions policies are more common at selective private institutions, with 42% of those colleges reporting that they consider legacy status in admissions compared to only 15% of selective public institutions. Across the country, less than 20 of the flagship public institutions have legacy admissions practices.
The more selective a school gets, the more likely it is that they offer a legacy admissions advantage. While the Wall Street Journal reported in 2020 that 56% of the “top 250 institutions” considered legacy, a 2022 report from the non-partisan think tank Education Reform Now found that when looking at schools that admit less than 25% of their applicants, 80% of those schools reported giving preference to legacy students.
It’s worth noting here that more schools have legacy admissions policies than they had affirmative action policies, though it there are certainly high profile examples of colleges that had both kinds of policies in place prior to the Supreme Court decision.
Impact of Legacy Admissions
Put simply: legacy admissions policies disproportionately benefit affluent white students, many of whom would not be admitted to a highly selective institution based solely on their academic merit.
According to Education Reform Now, “Many highly ranked universities and colleges enroll more legacies than Black students” because children of alumni (who are more likely to be white) “have a significant advantage in the admissions process at colleges with legacy preferences.”
There is no mystery to solve here for why that is the case, but let’s look at a Harvard University for a quick case study.
Research has shown that a legacy applicant at Harvard is four-times as likely to be admitted than a non-legacy applicant who has the same academic profile. Internal documents from Harvard that were filed during the Supreme Court case revealed that Harvard gave additional points in the admissions process to group of students known as “ALDC” students, which stood for legacy applicants, athletes, relatives of donors, and children of faculty or staff. ALDC students made up only 5% of the applicants but over 30% of the acceptances in a given year.
The additional points these students were given were made a significant impact on their chances of being admitted at a school that currently rejects over 95% of their applicants. According to a 2019 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 75% of the ALDC applicants would have been rejected by Harvard if they hadn’t received those additional points in the process. This was not a surprising finding, given that back in 1990, a federal Office of Civil Rights investigation of Harvard’s admissions practices found that “on almost every metric, including alumni interview ratings, non-legacy admits were ranked higher than legacy admits.”
The one metric where legacy students ranked higher? Athletics.
Around 70% of the ALDC students are white, including the majority of the children of alumni. This makes sense because the majority of Harvard’s students have always been white.
(Consider the class of 1997, who are now old enough to have children in college. That year, Harvard admitted 1563 students and the campus newspaper reported that the 143 Black students admitted for that class were “the highest number of Black students in the College’s history”. The school also patted itself on the back for enrolling “Twenty-seven Puerto Rican Americans, 10 Native Americans, 46 Hispanics, 46 Mexican Americans and 33 ‘others’”)
It isn’t just Harvard, of course. Schools that offer legacy preferences almost always5 benefit children of white alumni at the expense of better qualified applicants and racial diversity. The IHEP data shows that “selective institutions that do not consider legacy in admissions are more racially diverse, with higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students compared with selective institutions that do consider legacy status in admissions.”
(One of the most annoying things about the affirmative action lawsuits was the way that white students blamed students of color for “taking their spot” when the truth is that they really lost “their” spot to another white student- who may well have had lower grades than they did- who just happened to be a legacy)
Institutions that consider legacy status also typically enroll a smaller percentage of both first-generation college students and students who have financial need, with the IHEP data showing that 36% of students at legacy institutions qualify for the Pell Grant, compared to 42% at institutions that don’t give legacy preferences.
Why do Colleges do Legacy Admissions?
Three reasons: historical anti-Semitism, money, and yield.
Legacy admissions policies began in the 1920’s and 1930’s when highly selective institutions started expanding their applicant pool beyond the traditional private and boarding schools where they had historically drawn their (white, male, wealthy, Protestant) students from and began using admissions tests as a way to identify qualified applicants. This resulted in larger applicant pools and an increase in the number of Jewish students admitted to these institutions. The need to increase selectivity and a desire to limit the number of Jewish students helped drive institutions to begin to include non-academic factors in the admissions review process, including letters of recommendation and preferences for children of alumni.
This isn’t speculation, by the way. The anti-Semitism was both overt and well documented. For example, in 1922, Yale Universities admissions chairman Robert Nelson Corwin wrote in his Memorandum on Jewish Representation in Yale that “There seems to be no question that the University as a whole has about all of this race that it can well handle” and specifically advocated for finding “non-intellectual requirements” as a way to limit the number of Jewish students admitted in a given year. Other Ivy League schools, including Columbia and Harvard, also sought to lower their number of Jewish admits and followed similar practices as Yale.
By the end of the 1920’s, Harvard’s incoming class was made up of nearly 40% sons of alumni and the number of Jewish students had been reduced by over 50%. Legacy admissions combined with a new plan to recruit in the west and south had helped Harvard solve what its then president described as their “Jewish problem”.
Despite the fact that legacy admissions practices were designed to increase enrollment of Protestant students, and are still clearly primarily beneficial to white students, institutions that practice legacy admissions today don’t talk about legacy admissions as way to exclude. They put it in much cozier terms.
Vincent Price, president of Duke, sounded like an ad for Olive Garden when he defended legacy admissions to his faculty in 2022 by saying “We are an institution that was made in a family, the Duke family6. We bear the name of that family. We represent family. We talk about family," he said. "So how does that translate into the way we behave? The idea that you would ban legacy admissions or ban any particular factor as a consideration is troublesome."
And why is it troublesome? Well, it would make alumni mad. And mad alumni don’t give money.
(Anyone else suddenly craving a breadstick now? Just me?)
According to a 2018 report looking into alternatives to affirmative action practices, an internal committee at Harvard noted that legacy admissions “helps to cement strong bonds between the university and its alumni” and notes that “Harvard alumni also offer generous financial support to their alma mater”. Further when that internal committee that reviewed the possible impact of ending legacy admissions they were “concerned that eliminating any consideration of whether an applicant’s parent attended Harvard or Radcliffe would diminish this vital sense of engagement and support”.
Modern legacy admissions practices are designed to do two things: increase alumni giving and increase the institutional yield rate, both factors in many college rankings lists.
Let’s talk about alumni giving first. College rankings lists (which are bullshit, by the way) are based on multiple criteria that almost always advantage schools that admit wealthy students. One of the criteria has historically been the percentage of alumni that donate after graduation. The more alums who send a check every year, the higher the school goes on the list. Beyond improving their rankings, colleges also want alumni to donate because it increases the size of their endowment (and they all want to be well endowed) and provides ongoing financial support for scholarships and campus improvements.
Research has found that alumni with children donate more, perhaps because they can imagine that they are not only donating to their former school but also paving the way for their children’s future enrollment. This helps explain why alumni giving increases as their children approached college age. Giving levels decline after admissions decisions are released (perhaps as parents shift their monies toward paying tuition). Giving levels drop significantly among alumni if their child is rejected during the admissions process.
The admissions process is, as Howard Wolf, the 2013 president of the Stanford Alumni Association, noted “the point at which the University is most vulnerable in its relationship with its alumni”, which means that the selective schools have a financial incentive to want to say “yes” to the B+ kid of a wealthy alum at the same time they are saying “no” to the straight A first-generation kid.
Highly selective colleges are also concerned with their yield rates (the percent of the admitted students who chose to enroll). Schools with low acceptance rates and high yield rates tend to rank higher “best college” lists, which makes legacy applicants an appealing prospect. Legacy applicants are more likely to enroll when admitted, both because they are often less likely to be admitted at peer institutions and because they may have stronger emotional ties to the school. They are also less likely to need financial aid and more likely to donate after graduation, which means they can be a high ROI for institutions.
Arguments for Legacy Admissions
Unsurprisingly, most of the people who are publicly in favor of legacy admissions are alumni of high selective institutions that hope to send their children to their alma mater.
It is worth noting that this group does include some non-white alumni who argue that eliminating legacy admissions now, when the children and grandchildren of the first generations of non-white graduates from elite institutions are ready to apply, is a way of pulling up the ladder to once again disadvantaging students of color.
In an essay for the Hechinger Report, Yale alum Nick Chiles argues that those opposed to legacy admissions “want to deny parents like me the excitement derived from a profound shared experience with their children”. According to Chiles, Black alumni “finally made it in the door, and now they are seeking new ways to slam the door behind us” and that ending legacy preferences “feels like another case in which polite society wakes up and decides fairness should now be a priority and the system should be changed — just when my people have started benefiting from the system. In sheer numbers, if legacy admissions are banned along with affirmative action, I believe that Black people will suffer the most.”
The Future for Legacy Admissions
Legacy admissions policies are currently being challenged in a variety of ways, including the court of public opinion. To the extent they are aware of the practice, most Americans don’t like legacy admissions policies. A 2022 Pew research study found that 75% of Americans don’t believe that having a relative who attend the college should be a factor in an admissions decision.
Interestingly, there is one group of people who are even more opposed to legacy admissions practices: admissions directors. In a 2022 Inside Higher Ed survey, less than 15% of admissions directors agreed with the statement that “institutions should grant some degree of preference to legacy applicants over non-legacy applicants”.
Since 2015, over 100 schools, including Amherst, Wesleyan, and Pomona College, have ended their legacy programs, inspired in part by the the heightened scrutiny of legacy admissions policies in light of the affirmative action debate. In 2020, Ronald J. Daniels, president of John Hopkins, wrote in The Atlantic that legacy admissions was a form of “hereditary privilege” that was incongruent with “the ideals of merit and equal opportunity” and challenged the school’s ability to “educate qualified and promising students from all backgrounds”.
On the state level, Colorado, Virginia, New York, Connecticut, and California have passed legislation to ban the practice. Insiders predict more states will likely propose legislative bans when the 2025 legislative sessions begin. Federal legislation to ban the practice was introduced by Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) but has not been passed… yet.
On the legal front, Harvard University is currently under investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights based on a complaint that their donor and legacy preferences violate Title VI regulations. Harvard officials said in fall 2023 that they are also conducting an internal review of their legacy policy and that eliminating it may be “under consideration”.
Ultimately, I suspect more schools will voluntarily stop legacy admissions programs and at least a few more states will be successful in passing legislation to ban it in the next few years.
Somehow I think Harvard will survive.
Schools that admit less than 20% of their applicants
Always worth noting that “academic merit” is a contested concept too. Who gets to decide what counts as merit?
For lack of a better word. Not every school scores students on a point scale but basically the concept is the same: the applicant gets more favorable consideration.
Sometimes grandchild or sibling counts too
The obvious exception to this are the small handful of selective HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) that give legacy preference
Worth noting that the Duke “family” was white until 1963!