Dive Brief:
- The share of four-year colleges that use legacy admissions practices has fallen by roughly half since 2015, from 49% then to 24% by 2025, according to a study from the center-left nonprofit Education Reform Now.
- The group counted 420 institutions that give preferential treatment to applicants related to an alum. Meanwhile, 452 have stopped considering legacy ties since 2015. The number and share of institutions are both at their lowest since collection of the information began.
- The recent declines are due in part to revamped diversity commitments following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on race-conscious admissions, as well as a handful of new state laws prohibiting legacy admissions, the group said.
Dive Insight:
The decline in legacy admissions has been swift, the study found. Just between 2022 and 2023, 92 colleges stopped considering legacy status — an 18% decline in one year. And even more have dropped legacy admissions since then.
Of the colleges that nixed the practice, 86% did so via voluntary institutional decision, while 14% were complying with legislation, according to the study.
The report pulled from the Common Data Set and federal data, which began including legacy admissions policies in 2022. Historically, a clear data picture of an institution’s use of legacy status in admissions has been hard to come by. Colleges have at times also made ambiguous or erroneous entries in the Common Data Set.
Education Reform Now identified 12 states that have introduced proposals to ban on legacy admissions, and found that most focused on both public and private institutions.
Of the dozen states, five have passed bans, all in recent years: California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia. Only Maryland and California addressed private institutions. In several states, bills passed one legislative house but never made it to a vote in both.
Legacy admissions policies are concentrated in selective colleges. Among four-year institutions that accepted 25.5% or fewer of their applicants, 56.1% considered legacy status in admissions in the 2023-24 academic year. Nearly a third of colleges with acceptance rates between 25.6% and 50.4% also offered legacy preference, according to the group’s analysis of federal data.
Past research has found that legacy status can boost by more than threefold an applicant’s odds of acceptance to highly selective colleges. The practice originated, in part, from an effort in the early 20th century by elite, wealthy universities to keep Jewish applicants out.
One scholar in 2019 described legacy admissions as an “affirmative-action policy for rich white students,” which helps “the rich and powerful exploit their position and ensure class domination for the next generation.”
The practice has come under regulatory scrutiny as well. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s legacy admissions policy after a group filed a complaint alleging the practice offered de facto preferential treatment to White applicants.
Defenders of the practice have pointed to the boost legacy admissions give to fundraising, which in turn can support need-based financial aid that serves to diversify student bodies.
Some elite universities, including Yale and Harvard universities, said they were reviewing their legacy policies in the months after the Supreme Court decision. For now, both continue the practice. Some 11% of Yale’s class of 2027 has legacy ties, according to the university’s figures. A survey by The Harvard Crimson found that its share is roughly 32%.
