The bad math behind Harvard's refusal to do away with legacy admissions

For decades, sharing a last name with an alum of a prestigious university was a surefire way to get a leg up in the college-admissions gantlet — especially if they were a big donor. 

Since June, when the US Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions, a harsh spotlight has been cast on legacy admissions, especially at Harvard, which was a defendant in one of the cases.

Given how Harvard and other high-status schools have valued legacy students, it's unlikely they will give up the practice easily, even with the Department of Education investigating the practice. These institutions say legacy admissions help foster relationships with alumni and promote an intergenerational community. But experts told me there is an underlying justification: money. Schools might believe that giving preference to children of alumni would prompt donations down the road.

That rationale, however, is coming under scrutiny. The explosion of endowments at elite colleges has allowed many forward-looking schools to drop their legacy preference with no signs of financial suffering. By clinging to legacy admissions, colleges are not only undermining claims of advancing equality but may be shooting themselves in the financial foot. By prioritizing the children of alumni, they're casting aside a more diverse pool of qualified applicants who may be even more apt to donate down the line.

"Legacy harms almost all Americans unless you are legacy," James Murphy, the deputy director of higher-education policy at nonprofit Education Reform Now — which advocates for equality in education — told me. "And who's a legacy? It's a benefit that goes to the wealthiest people in the country and harms everybody else. So why do we even have it at this point?"

'A weak and sad excuse'

The legacy preference has always been a dance of public intentions and private subtext. When the practice started in the 1920s, schools said they were simply seeking applicants who demonstrated "good character" and "solidarity." In reality, Richard Kahlenberg, a nonresident scholar at Georgetown University who was an expert witness in the Supreme Court affirmative-action cases, told me, legacy preferences were actually designed to restrict the number of Jewish students who were admitted.

While the rationales for preserving legacy admissions have evolved, the propensity to obfuscate them hasn't. For the schools that still consider legacy status — more than 100 as of July, by one count — the stated rationale for the practice is usually a desire to "stay connected" with alumni. Princeton University's president, Christopher Eisgruber, told The Washington Post in 2017 that "the ties back to earlier generations add something special to our community." In a 2018 report, Harvard's Committee to Study Race-Neutral Alternatives said that considering alumni relationships in admissions "helps to cement strong bonds between the university and its alumni."

But as Ethan Poskanzer, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told me, legacies also "come from families that are more likely to be flagged as high potential donors."

"They're less likely to apply for financial aid and just pay more tuition," he continued. "And they also are more likely to attend the college if they are admitted, so they're more likely to accept their offers, which means a stabler stream of tuition for the college."

Loath as these schools are to be so explicit, their financial motivations aren't exactly kept secret. That same 2018 Harvard report noted that "Harvard alumni also offer generous financial support to their alma mater" and described their donations as "essential" to the university's operations. The report continued that "although alumni support Harvard for many reasons, the committee is concerned that eliminating any consideration of whether an applicant's parent attended Harvard or Radcliffe would diminish this vital sense of engagement and support."

If your giving goes down just because you removed this quid pro quo for alumni, then, gosh, you're not doing a great job of cultivating relationships with alumni, right?

Others have echoed these sentiments more recently. In an op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal this past summer, James Hankins, a history professor at Harvard, argued that wealthy schools like Harvard and Princeton "can't begin to maintain their operations on tuition alone" and that alumni generosity had largely kept those schools afloat. He also referred to the risk of relying on donations from "foreign donors and corporations" who might be seeking political influence, as opposed to "wealthy alumni — legacies themselves and the hopeful parents of legacies — who know and love the institution and want to show their loyalty." 

Murphy called this "a weak and sad excuse" to maintain legacy admissions.

"If your giving goes down just because you removed this quid pro quo for alumni, then, gosh, you're not doing a great job of cultivating relationships with alumni, right?" he told me. "If it's really just about an exchange, you don't have a strong alumni relationship."

Regardless, the sheer size of these schools' financial chests makes it hard to argue that alumni donations are necessary to survive. Harvard has the biggest college endowment in the US, totaling over $50 billion, and alumni donations don't make up a majority of its revenue. While Harvard has not publicly provided an exact breakdown of how much money it gets in alumni gifts, it reported earning 45% of its revenue in its 2022 fiscal year from philanthropy, which is the category that includes gifts from donors and alumni. It's unclear how big of a role alumni donations play within that category, but Harvard has largely grown its financial might on the back of investments — its private-equity investments, a third of the school's total portfolio, returned 77% in 2021 with a slight decline in 2022. Princeton, meanwhile, said it raised $140 million in unrestricted annual giving and spendable restricted gifts, including alumni donations in 2022 — but that money was just 0.4% of its total endowment of $35 billion.

If Harvard and the other schools clinging to legacy status got rid of the practice, there's little evidence that alumni donations would dry up. Murphy noted that MIT had never considered legacy, and its endowment is nearly $25 billion, while the University of Texas System has built a $30 billion endowment while operating under a state ban on legacy preference in public schools. In fact, a 2010 study by researchers at The Century Foundation of 100 top colleges also found "no statistically significant evidence that legacy preferences impact total alumni giving." When Amherst ditched legacy from its admissions process in 2021, it acknowledged it would be just fine financially without legacies, with its president Biddy Martin saying its $3.8 billion endowment allowed the school to make this decision. "We are doing what we're doing because we can, and because we should," he said. Gabrielle Starr, the president of Pomona College — which got rid of legacy admissions in 2017— also told CNN in a story this year that alumni had not stopped giving since the decision.

Ending legacy admissions could even end up strengthening the financial position of the schools. Research by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education found that 76% of all money donated to higher-education institutions in the 2021-2022 school year came from non-alumni donors — mainly from corporations and large organizations. If those big donors are convinced that eliminating legacy consideration is in the best interests of the school and students, Murphy said, it could lead to an increase in giving. Murphy also suggested that some alumni might become even more excited to donate to a school viewed as having made "the college admissions process a little fairer." And, in theory, by opening up the pool of potential alumni instead of relying on the same family trees, colleges have the chance to have the next mega-donor or corporate titan pass through their halls. When Wesleyan College announced in July it was dropping legacy admissions, its president, Michael Roth, said he believed that the move could actually lead to an increase in alumni donations. "I believe I can raise a lot of money from Wesleyan alums who are genuinely pleased to support an institution that's aligned with their values," he told Inside Higher Ed, an industry magazine, in an interview.

'It's embarrassing for institutions'

Legacy admissions aren't enough to keep a school financially afloat, but they are good for one thing: getting already wealthy kids into college. Research published this year by economists from Harvard and Brown found that children from families in the top 1% were "more than twice as likely" to attend an Ivy League school or Stanford, MIT, Duke, and University of Chicago as children from middle-class families who had comparable scores on standardized tests — they concluded 46% of this "admissions advantage" came from legacy preference. And a research paper authorized by Poskanzer and MIT's Emilio Castilla found that "legacies are neither more qualified applicants nor better students academically."

"Universities will say they're a mere tiebreaker, a minor factor, and all the careful research that's been done suggests, in fact, it's a very large preference. It makes a big difference in the makeup of the student bodies," Kahlenberg said, adding that in the Supreme Court cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, both schools gave a larger preference to legacy students. "So in essence, affirmative action for the wealthy and for disproportionately white students," he said.

I believe I can raise a lot of money from Wesleyan alums who are genuinely pleased to support an institution that's aligned with their values Michael Roth, Wesleyan College president

That very preference undermines schools' diversity pledges. Following the Supreme Court decision, Harvard said it would continue to admit students who reflect "multiple facets of human experience." Princeton has also vowed to fight racial inequity and has published diversity and bias reports on its progress over the past few years. But the persistence of legacy preference contradicts those efforts. "It's anti-social mobility," Murphy said. "Because if social mobility means college transforms you and you move up the income spectrum, if you're enrolling students coming from the richest homes in America or the richest households in America, then you're not having any impact on social mobility at all."

But the tide may finally be shifting against legacy admissions, once and for all. Since the Supreme Court decision, colleges have been removing the practice. When Wesleyan announced it was dropping legacy admissions Roth was adamant that it was the right move. "We still value the ongoing relationships that come from multi-generational Wesleyan attendance, but there will be no 'bump' in the selection process," he wrote in an open letter. "As has been almost always the case for a long time, family members of alumni will be admitted on their own merits."

Other schools like Carnegie Mellon and Occidental College did the same in the wake of the decision. Still, it's unclear whether prestigious schools like Harvard will follow suit in ending a practice that Kahlenberg called  "in many ways, deeply un-American," given that, in his view, "the idea of America was to get away from hereditary privilege and aristocracy." 

"It's embarrassing for institutions, especially now, because they take a very high moral posture and say, 'Racial diversity is essential to our existence,'" he said. "'We cannot provide an excellent education without it.' But if they're serious about that, the easiest and most straightforward thing to do is to eliminate preferences that disproportionately benefit wealthy white students."

Murphy said that he felt optimistic more colleges would ditch the practice — but that it's all about convincing the boards of trustees at private schools that "are typically made up of very wealthy people" who stand to benefit the most from legacy preferences. "I remain very optimistic," he said, "that in two years time it's going to be an incredibly rare practice and we're going to look back and say, 'What were we ever thinking as a country that we ever allowed this to go on?'"

Ayelet Sheffey is a senior economic policy reporter covering student debt on Insider's economy team.