End of Legacy Admissions

Level - Admissions 101

Welcome back! 

If you have been paying attention to the news, you may have heard about the recent vote in Maryland to eliminate admissions preference for legacy and donors. 

This follows a recent trend where admissions preferences are being challenged, beginning with affirmative action last year. 

But what does this actually mean? How does it impact YOU?

First, let’s begin with an overview of what legacy and donor status actually mean.

For some colleges, admissions consider whether a student’s immediate family member previously attended the college/university. Although the rules vary to some extent from college to college, the general rules are:

• Legacy status applies only to an immediate family member (parent, sibling, or spouse)

• Legacy status only comes into play if the family member attended the same program (e.g., if your mother went to the University of Southern California law school, legacy only applies if you apply to the law school, not the undergraduate program)

• Legacy either provides weight in your favor as an applicant (i.e. additional points in your favor) or will put you into a different application process where you compete against other legacy students (less common)

The challenge to legacy status is primarily focused on the fact that legacy is an inherited trait - by removing it, it promotes a more meritocratic admissions process. 

Whether that is true or not is debatable, but the mindset is that there is a desire to remove “less deserving” applicants from the pool. 

Donor status is similar to legacy status, except your family only has to have donated money to the university to get the preference.

Potential Impact

The first thing to note is that proposed laws typically ban legacy admissions as a justification for admission, but it does not ban colleges or universities from identifying students who are legacies. 

This is important because state governments have no power to regulate private donations. In other words, if a private citizen or entity endows a scholarship to support legacy students, this does not apply to that funding - it only applies to admission.

Put another way, if Jimmy applies to a college, the college can identify that Jimmy is a legacy student, and could let Jimmy know that he can apply for a legacy only scholarship to attend. But the college could not use Jimmy’s legacy status as a determining factor in how he is accepted.

Second, remember that colleges are focused on admitting students with 1) an ability to pay and 2) promote the college or university. Legacy students are more likely to donate and more likely to attend when granted admissions. 

Therefore, the incentive is for colleges to admit them. So trust colleges to find ways to circumvent the rules and figure out a way to get them in. 

Third, the laws being proposed and passed allow for private action if there is belief that the student was denied admission because admission was provided to someone based on legacy status. 

To be blunt, this is extremely difficult to prove as long as colleges and universities are not dumb. In other words, if all legacy students are in the range of 25-75% percentile of the accepted students range, it is hard to say they were accepted based on legacy status alone. 

There is also the matter of admissions being holistic - meaning that there is more to admissions than just SATs and GPAs. 

Simply put, to prove it, you would need to demonstrate that someone was offered admission to a college that, but for their legacy status, would not have been accepted. 

What It Means To You

Practically speaking, legacy admissions matters more in environments that are more selective and have smaller class sizes. 

The less selective and larger the class size, the less the impact any change in legacy admissions will really have. 

Beyond that, it really depends on views of legacy. If you believe that legacy students are typically undeserving, then it will logically flow that you should see fewer legacies and more non-legacies.

Our view is a little different. Our belief is that the banning of legacy as a deciding factor will only slightly make a difference in admission, but the larger potential is actually on the waitlist. 

Some schools will waitlist legacy applicants out of courtesy in part, but also because they know that legacy applicants are more likely to say yes if called off the waitlist. 

But legacy status is no longer considered, then the most likely scenario is legacy students will go from being waitlisted to being outright rejected. 

That could improve long-term outcomes, but in very small numbers. 

If you find our view pessimistic, consider this - legacy status matters in admissions, but it provides weight assuming the applicant has an already competitive application. 

In other words, it is extremely unlikely that you will find an applicant at Harvard who was accepted with a 1000 SAT simply because they were a legacy student. Instead, it is more likely that legacy status pushes one applicant past a similarly competitive applicant. 

If you remove legacy status, you are simply removing points from one applicant over another. It is still a pick’em type situation. 

We could be wrong, and obviously a lot needs to happen before we can make final determinations, but our belief is that where there is a will, colleges will find a way. And rewarding children of alumni is pretty high on college’s priority list.