Now that we’ve processed the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, the next admissions practice under scrutiny is legacy admissions, especially at the most highly selective colleges and universities. Just a few days after the latest ruling, the Boston-based group Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to challenge Harvard’s admissions practices yet again. This time, for favoring children of alumni.
LEGACY VS. NON-LEGACY ACCEPTANCE RATES
Twenty years ago, legacy applicants to the Ivy League generally saw rates of admission that were 3-4 times greater than the overall rate of admission. In the early 2000s, Harvard accepted a mere 11 percent of its total applicants, but admitted 40 percent of its legacy applicants. Likewise, in 2003 Penn admitted 21 percent of its total applicants and 51 percent of its legacy applicants. Princeton, according to a 2008 ABC News report, had a legacy acceptance rate of 40 percent, more than four times higher than the overall rate of admission.
As application volume has surged and admit rates have plunged, it’s fair to say that it’s not easy for anyone to gain entrance to a top college now – even a well-qualified legacy applicant. Although colleges are anything but transparent when it comes to sharing information about admission by cohort within the applicant pool, it’s a fair bet that legacies still enjoy better odds than most of their non-legacy counterparts. We know that from the period of 2014-2019, legacy applicants to Harvard enjoyed an admit rate of over 33 percent – a whopping five times greater than non-legacy applicants. At Princeton, the admit rate for legacies was six times the overall admit rate in 2018, while at Stanford, they were three times as likely for the Class of 2022. At the University of Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, and Georgetown University, legacies were admitted at double the rate of regular applicants.
Last year, the ACLU reported that “among the top 100 universities, only 27 either never used or have ended the use of legacy preferences.” Growing calls to end this decades-old practice have prompted some elite institutions to take action on their own accord. Pomona College ended legacy preferences in 2017. In 2020 and 2021, respectively, Johns Hopkins University and Amherst College announced the elimination of legacy preferences from their admissions procedures, joining ranks with top schools like MIT and Caltech (which have never had legacy admissions policies). Large public flagship universities like the University of California, University of Texas, and University of Georgia dropped legacy preferences years ago. In 2021, Governor Jarod Polis signed legislation that barred legacy preferences at all Colorado public colleges and universities. Just this week, Pittsburgh media reported that children of alumni will no longer have an admissions advantage at both Carnegie Mellon and Pitt. Interestingly, neither university made a public statement about this change. Today, Wesleyan announced the end of legacy preferences in admissions. As Wesleyan President Michael Roth noted in an interview with the New York Times, legacy played a “negligible role” in admissions at the university.
Those who seek to ban legacy admissions are steadfast in their belief that this preference only helps those who are already the most advantaged in our society. These broad statements, however, rarely acknowledge that most legacy students admitted to top colleges are in fact top students whose academic and extracurricular accomplishments are on par with those of their non-legacy peers. Additionally, it’s important to acknowledge that given the substantial efforts to diversify their student bodies over the last 30 years, top colleges now have alumni of color as well as alumni who were first in their families to go to college whose children are now applying to these very same schools.
So why, in this era of seeking to expand access to communities that continue to be underrepresented at top colleges – low-income students, those who are first in their families to go to college, and specifically, Black, Hispanic, and Native American students – do legacy preferences persist?
WHY LEGACY PREFERENCES REMAIN IN PLACE
Two reasons: admissions yield and fundraising.
“Through the Front Door: Why Do Organizations (Still) Prefer Legacy Applicants?”, a 2022 study co-authored by professors Ethan Poskanzer, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, and Emilio Castilla, MIT Sloan School of Management, looked at 16 years of data from an elite Northeastern private college that is representative of the top 25 schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. What they found was sky-high yield rates for legacy applicants – 74 percent – as compared to a 47 percent yield for non-legacy applicants. As schools seek to carefully manage their enrollments and tuition revenue, alumni children help provide greater yield stability and predictability to their calculations.
What Poskanzer and Castilla did uncover was, not surprisingly a significant difference in who was likely to donate. “Legacies make better alumni after graduation and have wealthier parents who are materially positioned to be more generous donors than non-legacy parents,” the authors wrote.
Harvard, with its over $50 billion endowment may not need legions of small dollar alumni donors to keep the lights on, but for schools that are more dependent on tuition revenue, these intergenerational connections do matter. Dollars raised through alumni giving are often earmarked for key institutional priorities like need-based financial aid.
OUR PREDICTION
Pressure will continue to mount on top colleges to do away with legacy admissions, leading more schools to publicly announce the end of legacy preferences. For those, like Wesleyan, who claim it never held much sway in their admissions process, this is an easier choice and a good PR move. The most highly selective colleges and universities who will face the most pressure to do so will likely step back from the process quietly and gradually, while others will remain more tight-lipped about their legacy and donor preferences.
In addition, Maria is proud of her long-term volunteer work with Opera North (Lebanon, NH) in fundraising, marketing and audience engagement. She is an avid masters rower with the Upper Valley Rowing Foundation (Hanover, NH) and also serves as a member of its board of directors.
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