Is It Time to End Legacy Admissions?

DOS_patos · Jul 2, 2023

Many colleges favor children of alumni — legacies — in the admissions process.
Legacies most often come from white, wealthy families, undercutting diversity efforts.
Because of public scrutiny, some institutions have discontinued legacy admissions.
A new bill in Congress proposes banning legacy admissions nationwide.

Should children of alumni have an advantage in the college admissions process? A growing number of universities, politicians, and policy experts say no, but so far the Ivy League and most other top schools haven't abandoned the practice.

Is it time for higher education to end legacy admissions once and for all?

Amherst College Is the Latest to Drop Legacy Admissions

Recently, Amherst College, an elite liberal arts institution in Western Massachusetts, announced it would no longer consider legacy status in its admissions process. Legacies account for about 11% of each class at Amherst. At the same time, the college is expanding its financial aid program to accommodate more low- and middle-income families.

"Now is the time to end this historic program that inadvertently limits educational opportunity by granting a preference to those whose parents are graduates of the college," said Biddy Martin, Amherst's president.

Viet Nguyen must be thrilled. The 2017 Brown University graduate started Leave Your Legacy, a grassroots effort to persuade colleges to drop the practice. Through the organization's website, alumni can email their alma maters and threaten to withhold donations until the institutions abandon legacy preferences. To date, over 1,000 people have joined the cause.

"It's inherently unjust," Nguyen told Inside Higher Ed. As a first-generation student, he didn't benefit from legacy status. "It's a process based solely on lineage."

Johns Hopkins University president Ronald J. Daniels bought into this idea long ago. Daniels, a Canadian, attended the University of Toronto, where legacy status doesn't matter. In 2014, five years into his presidency, Daniels decided to discontinue legacy admissions.

"Legacy preference is immobility written as policy, preserving for children the same advantages enjoyed by their parents," Daniels wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "It embodies in stark and indefensible terms inherited privilege in higher education and has compromised college and university admissions for decades. Moreover, it has drained the public trust in colleges and universities at a moment when the public is seething with rage at the seeming illusion of the meritocratic ideal and widening inequality."

Did it work? The year before changing its policy, Hopkins enrolled 8.5% legacies and 8.1% first-generation students in its entering class. In 2021, only 3.7% are legacies, and 17.8% are first-generation.

Legacy Admissions as Affirmative Action for the Rich

Legacy admissions began a century ago as a way to curb the increasing presence of Jewish students and enroll more sons of the Protestant elite. Dartmouth instituted the practice in 1922; Yale, in 1925. As late as the 1960s, legacy applicants were virtually guaranteed admission to the nation's top private colleges.

Today, while legacies aren't guaranteed admission, they certainly remain well represented on these campuses. In the Class of 2023, just over 16% of students at Stanfordare legacies, as are 12% at Dartmouth, 14% at Princeton, and 12% at Yale. Twenty-two percent of the University of Pennsylvania's Class of 2025 are legacy students. At Cornell, the Class of 2022 included twice as many legacies as African American students in 2019. And at Harvard, the Class of 2022 is 36% legacies.

Between 2010 and 2015, legacy applicants at Harvard were five times more likely to gain admission than non-legacies. At Princeton, they were four times as likely in 2018, while at Stanford, they were three times as likely in 2017. At the University of Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, and Georgetown University, legacies are admitted at double the rate of regular applicants. In fact, in 2020, about half of legacy applicants were admitted at UVA, which encourages alumni children to apply through its Admission Liaison Program.

Moreover, legacies tend to come from wealthy, white families. At Harvard, for example, almost 70% of legacy applicants are white.

"More white students are admitted to top 10 universities under an alumni preference bonus than the total number of Black and [Latino/a] students admitted under affirmative action policies," wrote Michael Dannenberg of Education Reform Now. "Virtually no legacy student attending an elite institution is low-income."

Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation who edited a book about legacy admissions, has an especially critical view of the practice.

"Legacy preferences … are affirmative action for the rich, which heap additional advantage on the already advantaged," said Kahlenberg in an interview with Inside Higher Ed."They are unpopular and un-American."

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