The Latest on Legacy Admissions

Legacy admissions have been a contentious topic in higher education, referring to giving preferential treatment to applicants who have family members who previously attended the same institution. Critics argue that this practice perpetuates social inequalities and undermines merit-based admissions. Here’s the latest on the renewed scrutiny after the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action.

An analysis from the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that 53% of selective four-year colleges – including Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and, yes, Harvard, among others – consider legacy status in their admission decisions.

New research from Harvard economists and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that “children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.” This backs up a 2019 NBER study of publicly released reports from Harvard that found that nearly half of the university’s white students were recruited athletes, related to alumni, children of faculty and staff, or were “of special importance to the dean of admissions.”

The New York Times reported the NBER study released last week found that children of alumni at Ivy-Plus colleges “were nearly four times as likely to be admitted as applicants with the same test scores.” Moreover, “legacy students from the richest 1 percent of families were five times as likely to be admitted.” The researchers “compared legacies’ chance of admission at the colleges their parents attended versus similarly elite schools. They found that they were slightly more likely to get into the other colleges than applicants with the same test scores.

The New York Times also reported that with the end “of race-based affirmative action, the practice of giving admissions preference to relatives of alumni is particularly under fire at the most elite institutions, given the outsized presence of their alumni in the nation’s highest echelons of power.” President Biden “last month instructed the Education Department to examine how to improve diversity in admissions, including ‘what practices hold that back, practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.’”

The Washington Post reported colleges that offer legacy admissions “defend the practice, saying legacy status is one of many factors that are considered and that it helps them build lasting relations with their alumni, whose donations can make financial aid possible to other applicants. But several studies have shown that legacy admissions overwhelmingly favor wealthy and White applicants, and critics have described the practice as reverse affirmative action – benefiting such students at the cost of applicants of color and other disadvantaged groups.