Campaign to end legacy admissions at colleges grows

Critics argue that if students of color cannot get a leg up, then the children of wealthy alumni shouldn’t get one, either. Proponents maintain that legacy admissions foster community and loyalty among graduates. 

Virginia and Illinois banned the practice at public universities in 2025, while Maryland and California have made the practice illegal in private colleges as well. Proposed bans stalled this year in Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut amid blowback from Ivy League institutions.

Advocates said they plan to keep trying and hope California’s new law will help lead the way. There is also an effort on the federal level, though it has made little progress. 

In California, the law, which Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed in September, goes into effect in 2025. It was largely seen as an attempt to level the playing field.  

Assemblyman Phil Ting, a Democrat from San Francisco who co-authored the bill, said the new law will make the college admissions process “more fair and equitable.”

“Legacy admissions helps the students who least need it,” he said. “This country is supposed to be a meritocracy. Students who already have every advantage should not be taking spots away from students who’ve worked extra hard to get there.”

Julio Mata, president of the Western Association for College Admission Counseling, doesn’t agree on the degree of the ban’s effects. 

“It’s more symbolic,” he told CalMatters. “It might open up a few spots for regular students, but it won’t completely change the landscape.”

Mata added that being a legacy in California was “never a golden ticket.” 

“It’s just one factor in admissions,” he said. “And not every alumni or donor is going to be viewed with the same weight. Some are more notable than others.”

Nearly a third of all selective four-year institutions in the United States considered legacy status for first-time students enrolling in the fall of 2022, according to the Institute for Higher Education Policy. 

“These policies were especially prevalent at selective private nonprofit four-year institutions, 42% of which considered legacy status,” the group said. “Fifteen percent of select public four-year colleges also considered an applicant’s family ties to the institution when making admissions decisions, encompassing a large share of the students who are affected by legacy status in admissions.” 

In the 2021-2022 academic year, 2.1 million undergraduate students enrolled in institutions that considered legacy status when making admissions decisions. Public four-year colleges accounted for nearly 2 in 5 of those students. 

A 2023 civil rights complaint against Harvard University reported that between 2014 and 2019, legacy applicants were six times more likely to be admitted. Though “recruited athletes, legacies, relatives of donors and children of faculty and staff” make up less than 5% of the applicant pool to the prestigious school, they make up 30% of those accepted each year.

At Princeton University, legacy applicants are four times more likely to gain admission.  

Legacy status is also considered at the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, Duke, and Brown.

Don Bishop, University of Notre Dame’s former head of enrollment, estimated in a 2022 interview that up to 25% of the school’s incoming classes are legacies. 

Mikayla Tsai, a third-year behavioral neuroscience major at Northeastern University, believes that belonging to a particular family should never be a factor when considering admission. 

“I believe the [legacy policy] is outdated and should be abolished as it creates an unfair advantage for already privileged individuals whose parents have likely obtained a college degree and can financially provide for themselves,” she wrote in an op-ed piece for the Huntington News. “Even so, this policy has been shown to lower the chances of admission for people of varying race and socioeconomic status. Ideally, an applicant should be assessed based on criteria including their academic standing, merit, and individuality. However, legacy admissions may result in disparities and failure to foster a diverse and equitable educational environment.”

Education Reform Now, a nonprofit think tank, believes legacy admissions are an example of systemic racism, and the practice, which dates back to World War I and World War II as a way to limit Jewish enrollment, needs to be banned altogether. During that time, Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Columbia University, and Yale University moved away from merit-based admission policies and started to consider a prospective student’s lineage. 

“Although it is hard to imagine that this antisemitic impulse remains at the heart of legacy preferences at elite institutions, there is powerful evidence that providing an admissions advantage through family bloodlines effectively works as a deterrent to diversity and rewards families whose lineage go back centuries at some institutions,” the nonprofit organization said. 

However, others, such as Steven Gerrard, the Mark Hopkins professor of philosophy at Williams College, argue that legacy admissions actually enhance diversity on college campuses.  

“If the legacy student took the place of a first-generation student, I would light the torches myself,” he said. “But that’s not the way it works. At least at the colleges I am talking about, no legacy is admitted at the expense of a first-generation student; they are admitted at the expense of other privileged students who have other excellent options.”

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Crimson Education CEO Jamie Beaton believes that legacy admissions may not be perfect but that they “continue to help keep America’s best universities on top of the world stage at every level: diversity, funding, academic publication rates, student outcomes, and alumni engagement.”

“If we want the U.S. to sustain its global dominance in higher education, this is one of the competitive advantages we should be preserving,” he said.