Once upon a time, critics of legacy preferences didn’t know all that much about the controversial practice and its impact. But that, like so much else in admissions, is changing.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education released data showing how many public and private colleges consider an applicant’s legacy status in their admissions process. (The Chronicle published a useful table here.) It’s the first time that the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, has asked institutions to indicate whether they have legacy preferences.
And on Wednesday, Education Reform Now, a nonpartisan think tank and advocacy group, released a policy brief explaining where things stand just a few months after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions. The ruling, issued in June, stoked a national conversation about legacy considerations, which overwhelmingly benefit white, affluent students. The brief offers a helpful overview of a practice that has long operated “in the shadows of college admissions.”
Here are five things you should know:
Many colleges have recently ditched legacy preferences, often with no fanfare.
Education Reform Now previously found that more than 100 institutions stopped considering legacy status between 2015 and 2022. And in the new analysis of the latest federal data, James S. Murphy, its deputy director of higher-education policy, determined that just 28 percent of public and private four-year colleges now consider legacy status, down from nearly 50 percent in 2020.
OK, you might ask, but what about the tier of institutions that inspire most of the nation’s admissions angst? A majority of the most selective colleges (58 percent) still use legacy preferences, Murphy found, but that’s down from 75 percent in 2020.
In any case, the new data confirm that colleges using legacy preferences are, in fact, outliers. That’s especially true among public institutions, just under 13 percent of which give the children of alumni a boost (compared with 35 percent of private colleges).
One striking finding: A majority of institutions with endowments greater than $1 billion (54 percent) give a boost to children of alumni.
The impact of legacy preferences varies among institutions.
Obsess over superselective colleges if you must, but don’t forget that most four-year colleges admit a majority of their applicants. At such institutions, one’s legacy status typically plays little or no role in admissions decisions.
But the more selective a college is, Murphy writes, “the greater the impact legacy preferences are likely to have on who is admitted.”
The lawsuit Students for Fair Admissions filed against Harvard College — the case that ended up at the Supreme Court — revealed that the children of alumni with the highest academic ratings were significantly more likely to be admitted than were other equally qualified applicants who lacked a familiar connection to the institution. And recent research from Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts, illuminated the immense advantage that legacy applicants — especially the wealthiest legacy applicants — enjoy at the nation’s most-selective colleges.
Those preferences, Murphy writes, “serve the students who need the least help in gaining access to a high-quality education and exclude the students most likely to benefit from attending a highly selective institution.”
More nuanced data on legacy would provide greater transparency.
The first rule of legacy club is you do not talk about legacy club: That’s more or less the mentality of colleges that consider legacy status but don’t publicly share any numbers that might help the public better understand the impact of those preferences on admissions decisions.
Not a single college, Murphy has found, publicizes the number of legacy students who apply, the number who are admitted, and the number who enroll. “Without those numbers,” he writes, “it is impossible to determine the admit rates for legacy applicants relative to other applicants at any single institution, which explains why little research has been conducted on the impact of legacy admissions.”
Last winter a coalition of civil-rights groups, college-access advocates, and researchers sent a letter urging the Department of Education to collect data on the number of legacy applicants, admits, and enrollees at each college — disaggregated by race and Pell Grant eligibility.
Expect calls for such data to continue now that IPEDS includes basic information about legacy considerations.
The end of race-conscious admissions didn’t spark an immediate anti-legacy revolution, but … it’s still early.
It’s true that a handful of prominent institutions — including Carleton and Occidental Colleges, Virginia Tech, and Wesleyan University — dropped their legacy preferences within days or weeks of the Supreme Court’s ruling on race-conscious admissions.
It’s also true that many prominent institutions have said that they will continue to consider legacy status, at least for now.
As The Washington Post reported in September, all eight Ivy League institutions, plus several other highly selective private colleges, have resisted calls to end the practice. The same goes for some prominent public institutions, including the College of William & Mary and the University of Virginia, plus the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which said it would continue to consider the legacy status of out-of-state applicants only.
But let’s remember: Colleges tend to move slowly when considering any policy shift. The many task forces now studying admissions policies on various campuses might reach different conclusions about the future of legacy preferences in the months and years ahead. It’s probably naïve to think that most big-name colleges will jettison the practice, but it would be premature to say that more won’t eventually do so.
Legacy preferences have practical implications — and a symbolic meaning.
Dismantling legacy preferences on every single campus wouldn’t remove the mountain of disadvantage that many low-income and underrepresented-minority students must overcome to gain admission to elite institutions. But Murphy describes removing such policies as one of many reforms that could help make the admissions process fairer.
“The question college presidents and boards of trustees need to ask themselves,” he writes, “is whether protecting family bloodlines should be a priority.”
What do colleges prioritize? And how well do their admissions practices match their stated missions? The answers to such questions have always mattered. But at a time of upheaval in admissions, in an era of growing skepticism about how well colleges serve society, those answers just might matter more than ever.
