The Supreme Court decision killing college affirmative action and new academic research on Ivy League admissions have heightened questions about the fairness of “legacy” preferences.
By Rina Torchinsky, Contributor
Nearly a decade ago, Johns Hopkins University, the powerhouse research university located in Baltimore, Maryland, began a quiet experiment: It started to eliminate “legacy preference”—a special boost it gave to the children, grandchildren and siblings of alumni–from its undergraduate admissions process. The move was so sensitive, the school didn’t make the change public until 2020. Last fall, 1.7% of Johns Hopkins’s incoming freshmen were children of alumni, down from 8.5% in 2013.
David Phillips, Hopkins’ vice president of admissions and financial aid, admits the university didn’t know what sort of reaction it would get when it went public. “Of course, there were some people who thought, ‘Boy, wish you kept that policy,’” he recalls. “But what I was really struck by is how many emails I got from alums saying, ‘Boy, I’m obviously a proud Hopkins alum and I’m even prouder today.’”
These days, a legacy policy change at a big-name school would be unlikely to fly under the radar for years. Since June, when the Supreme Court put an end to affirmative action for underrepresented minority applicants in college admissions, another flavor of affirmative action—for the children of alumni and for the offspring of wealthy donors—has drawn heightened scrutiny. Just last month, the Department of Education announced it was opening an investigation into a complaint, filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights, alleging Harvard racially discriminates by applying legacy and donor preference in its undergraduate admissions process. (According to the Supreme Court record, athletes, children of alumni, donors and faculty collectively comprise around 30% of applicants admitted to Harvard each year.)
It’s not just Harvard. A Forbes analysis of the highest ranked 100 colleges on our America’s Top Colleges list for 2022 shows 78% of the private colleges give at least some consideration to legacy in admissions, compared with only 15% of top public colleges. (About 60% of the top 100 for 2022 were private.) Our analysis, based on information from what’s known as the Common Data Set, doesn’t show how each individual college defined legacy (the child of a graduate is common) or what impact that consideration actually had on who ultimately got admitted.
But a groundbreaking study, released in July by a team led by Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty, came up with this striking result: Legacy applicants from the top 1% of families with the highest incomes were five-times more likely to be admitted to an “Ivy-Plus” college than other students with comparable credentials, including similar SAT/ACT scores. That reflected the combined advantage of being rich and having legacy; legacy applicants whose parents’ incomes fell in the bottom 90% were three times as likely to gain admission as other applicants with comparable credentials. (Ivy-Plus, for the purpose of the study, includes Duke, MIT, Stanford and the University of Chicago as well as the eight members of the Ivy League: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. MIT gives no preference to legacies.)
Notably, being a legacy from one of the Ivy-Plus schools didn’t help applicants at other Ivy-Plus schools their parents didn’t attend, though being from the top 1% did still give them a significant boost. Chetty and his coauthors, economists David J. Deming of Harvard and John N. Friedman of Brown, also looked at admissions by flagship state universities and found they were no more likely to admit high-income children than students with similar test scores from less wealthy families.
Top state schools certainly provide a fine education. But the new study, a product of Opportunity Insights, a Chetty-led institute that attempts to analyze big data sets in novel ways to understand economic mobility, points out that leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of the most elite private schools. Less than 1% of Americans have attended Ivy-Plus schools, but their graduates, the researchers say, account for 15% of the top 0.1% on the income scale, plus half of all Rhodes scholars and three-quarters of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half century. These elite schools also serve as a funnel to entry jobs at top banking, consulting and law firms.
The richest students do better when it comes to the Ivy-Plus schools in part because they go to fancy, non-religious private schools that write them glowing recommendations or because they play expensive sports that make them desirable to college coaches. But legacy preference is the biggest contributor to the overrepresentation of students from wealthy families at Ivy-Plus schools. “Legacy admissions has come to stand out like a sore thumb in debates about equity, inclusion and access,” says Mitchell Stevens, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford.
One apparent reason that private schools give way more preference to both legacies and wealthy students than state flagships do: money. According to a report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, state and local support for four-year public colleges amounted to $11,464 in funding per student in 2022.
Without state funding, private universities are more reliant on tuition and private donations and investment income from their endowments—which represent past donor gifts, compounded by investment returns. “We’ve opted for colleges and universities that are substantially independent from government sources of revenue,” Stevens says. “Colleges and universities are constantly seeking patronage, and, of course, their primary patrons are the ones that they serve directly—their current students and their prior students …This is a tradition as old as higher education in the United States.”
While many less elite private schools are open in their preference for students who can afford to pay full tuition, all the Ivy-Plus schools claim to be “need blind” in their admissions, at least when it comes to U.S. freshmen. Being need-blind means schools don’t consider an applicant’s ability to pay as a determining factor in whether they are admitted. It also used to mean that schools qualified for the 568 Exemption–a Congressionally passed provision that expired last year and allowed colleges to agree on a common financial aid formula without running afoul of the antitrust law. (A now pending lawsuit claims the schools violated the terms of 568 by, among other things, giving preference to wealthy past or potential future donors.)
Katharine Meyer, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, explains the financial aspect of legacy admissions can play out in two ways. “The theory being that, if alumni think that their child is more likely to get into a college, they may be more likely to donate,” Meyer says. Alumni might also be more likely to donate because their child is a student at the university, and parents are “remembering their own potentially positive college experience, and they’re more likely to give,” she adds. But a definitive link between legacy admission and alumni giving hasn’t been established by empirical research, she cautions.
In fact, Hopkins’ Phillips says the university did not see a decline in donations after removing legacy consideration. The school had pushed through the change at the urging of its Canadian president, Ronald J. Daniels, who has described legacy preference as “this form of hereditary privilege in American higher education.” But the school, which admitted just 6.5% of applicants last year, was also uniquely positioned to take such a risk. Between its health sciences schools and its physics and defense work, it’s got the biggest research and development budget of any university; more than a third of its revenue came from federal grants and contracts in 2021, compared to about 8% for all private nonprofit universities.
Plus, Hopkins has one very rich alumnus who doesn’t like legacy. It has received more than $3 billion in donations from Forbes 400 member Michael Bloomberg, who during his run for president in 2020 called for the end of legacy admissions. In 2018, he gave $1.8 billion to Hopkins to help low- and moderate-income students attend.
Similarly, Amherst College, a top ranked liberal arts school west of Boston which eliminated legacy consideration for the freshmen class that starts in September, has an extraordinary financial cushion. As of 2021, its endowment per student totaled $2.1 million, the fifth highest per student in the U.S., trailing only Princeton, Yale, MIT and Stanford. Alumni kids make up just 6% of the new class, down from 11% when legacy was considered, a spokesperson says.
It’s unclear how many schools will move to eliminate legacy preferences now that the Supreme Court has ended affirmative action. In mid-July, Wesleyan University announced that it would end legacy preferences. Occidental College did so a week later.
Certainly the end of affirmative action makes the issue more salient. With legacy status in the mix at elite private colleges, there’s only so much room left for diversity, observes Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute. “A big chunk of those slots go to legacy admits who…are disproportionately white. Another big slot goes to student athletes, who, in many cases at the elite private institutions, are disproportionately white. And so you’re left with a simply smaller pool of general admits,” Cook says. “That’s sort of where the opportunities for racial diversity occur.”
Several schools that still consider legacy insisted to Forbes that it’s not really a big factor in admissions–or all about the money. The Common Data Set we used to identify those who consider legacy is put together in a collaboration among the College Board, Peterson’s, and U.S. News & World Report. Colleges are asked to tick boxes showing what they consider in the admissions process, ranking a number of factors as “very important”, “important”, “considered” or “not considered.” The latest data available is from the 2022-2023 academic year and doesn’t reflect any changes schools may have made since then–or since the Supreme Court ruling. Data was available for all but nine of our top 100 schools.
Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, for example, identified high school GPA, recommendations, the application essay and extracurriculars as “very important.” It marked class rank and volunteer work as “important,” and said it “considered” alumni relations (i.e. legacy), standardized test scores, religious affiliation, first generation status and yes, race. “[We] want our alums to feel connected to the community and committed to its future,’’ says Gladwyn Lopez, a spokesperson for Vassar in explaining why the school considers legacy. Lopez notes that less than 5% of Vassar students are legacy admits and adds another reason it makes sense to consider legacy: The children of alumni might know more about the school and how they’d fit in.
The fitting in part is not as squishy a motive as it sounds. Brookings’ Meyer notes universities may expect legacy students to be more likely to say yes to an offer of admission, raising what’s known as the yield rate–and a higher yield rate makes a school seem more desirable. Indeed, for years, the University of Pennsylvania, on its web site, told the children and grandchildren of graduates that they’d get the “most consideration” for their legacy status if they applied for early decision–a binding process that requires the students who are accepted to attend, thus raising a school’s yield rate. But for the Class of 2026, the school’s student newspaper discovered, Penn updated its admissions web site to downplay that well-known legacy preference. It now reads, more ambiguously: “Legacies who apply to Penn—like all applicants—receive thorough consideration in the application process.” The University of Pennsylvania did not respond to a request for comment.
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