The fight over college legacy admissions
Describing its incoming class of 2025, Yale boasted that its students hailed from 48 states, 68 countries and 1,221 high schools. What’s more, the university announced last year, 51 percent of the class identified as students of color.
Yet even as Yale promotes the diversity of its first-year students, the college has clung to an admissions tradition — legacy preferences — that mostly benefits students who are white, wealthy and well-connected. Of the incoming students, 14 percent were the offspring of a Yale graduate, receiving the kind of admissions boost also used at other elite institutions.
Not much has made a dent in the century-old tradition, despite efforts to end the preference that have been waged by progressive students, lawmakers and education reformers. Many colleges say legacy students cement family ties and multigenerational loyalty. And only a few elite colleges have abolished the preference.
The practice of legacy admissions, however, may soon face its greatest test yet — and in a twist, its future could be tied to the future of affirmative action.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments this fall about race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. If the court ends or rolls back the widely used practice of considering race in selecting students, as many experts expect, the ruling could prompt a reconsideration of legacy applicants. Explicitly favoring the children of alumni — some of whom would be competitive applicants regardless because of socioeconomic advantages — would become harder to defend if racial preferences are no longer allowed.
“If the Supreme Court outlaws affirmative action, legacy preferences will not be long for this world,” said Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School. Driver, an expert on the Supreme Court and education, supports race-conscious admissions and called legacy preferences “a little like rooting for Elon Musk to purchase the winning lottery ticket.”
The University of California system, the University of Georgia and Texas A&M all ended legacy preferences when they were pressured by lawsuits and ballot initiatives to stop using affirmative action, according to a Century Foundation analysis.
Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative group that filed the Supreme Court cases against Harvard and North Carolina — and also sued Yale — has argued that eliminating legacy preferences is one way to help achieve racial diversity without using affirmative action, which the organization says is discriminatory. One member of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas, has openly opposed affirmative action and signaled his belief legacy preferences and other factors poison the admissions process.
That context puts universities in a decidedly awkward position when it comes to defending legacy admissions. The topic is so sensitive few officials at selective colleges with legacy preferences would discuss them.
The use of legacy admissions dates back to the 1920s, when elite colleges, traditionally the domain of wealthy Protestants, became concerned that spots were being taken by Jews and Catholics.
The exact number of schools that use legacy preferences is unknown, but a survey by Inside Higher Ed in 2018 found that 42 percent of private schools — including most of the nation’s elite institutions — and 6 percent of public schools used the strategy. Only a handful of elite colleges — including Johns Hopkins and Amherst — have abandoned the preference in recent years.
Many college officials have argued that legacy preferences are only a small part of the selection process. But on a practical level, they help colleges manage their enrollment rates and predict their tuition revenue. Students who are legacies, as children of alumni are known, are more likely to attend if admitted, increasing a factor known as “yield” in the industry.
In Connecticut, where lawmakers held a hearing on the issue in February, Yale was among the private schools that came out in opposition. In written testimony, Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, called the proposed ban a government intrusion into university affairs.
“The process for selecting students for admission, together with the processes for hiring faculty and deciding which courses to offer, defines a campus community and culture,” he wrote.