Legacy Admissions Explained

Level 5 - Ivy League

Welcome! Today we are going to cover one of the most important aspects of college admissions: legacy admissions.

When people usually raise unfair admissions practices, the focus is usually on things such as affirmative action. Legacy admissions, while often maligned by applicants, are a “forgotten stepchild” in the admissions world.

As usual, we are not here to focus on the way that admissions should work. In our experience, it is a waste of time to hope for a better admissions process. Hope without action is largely meaningless. Instead, we focus on the way things are and our reasonable anticipation of what is to come.

Therefore, this post will help explain the role legacy plays in admissions. Note, every college is going to be different, but this should help provide general guidance.

Without further ado, lets get started.

Part 1: What is a legacy?

Let us start with the basics. Legacy status is given to an applicant who is directly related to an individual who attended the college. Most often, this will be a child who’s parent attended the university, but each school will define legacy status differently. For example, some colleges will extend it to a sibling or a grandparent.

Every college treats legacy status differently. Generally speaking:

• Public universities tend to not view legacy status as a factor in college admissions, while private schools tend to (around 50% of private colleges consider legacy)

• Overall, legacy status is being considered by fewer colleges overall as compared to a few years ago

• More selective colleges tend to give greater weight to legacy status than non-selective colleges

• Typically, legacy status is applied in a “like for like” situation. For example, a student who’s parent went to the University of Chicago for undergrad would receive legacy status for an undergraduate application, but that would not be the case if they went to the University of Chicago for an MBA.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into how legacies are viewed in admissions.

Part 2: How admissions view legacies

Legacy admissions are not all the same, but in our experience, there are generally three ways in which legacies are processed in admissions: