With more and more schools doing away with legacy admissions in response to the recent Supreme Court ruling about affirmative action, I’m hoping the CC Community can crowdsource a list of 4-year schools that do not consider legacy as part of the admissions process. This can be a recent change, one that happened a long time ago, or a policy that was always in effect.
Please comment below with any schools that have announced that they will not consider legacy during admissions. And If you have a source, please post it! Thank you.
What’s the point of listing public colleges and universities here? Few of them consider an applicant’s legacy status in admissions. We should list those few that still do instead.
Since the question was “which colleges have done away with legacy admissions?”, these two, strictly speaking, do not belong on this list, since they never practiced legacy admissions in the first place, unlike the rest of the schools listed above.
In fact, Chris Peterson of MIT Admissions wrote a blog post back in 2012 addressing a mistake in a WSJ article in no uncertain terms:
"It is, indeed, unusual for a school like MIT to have no preference for legacies. But one of the things that makes MIT special is the fact that it is meritocratic to its cultural core. In fact, I think if we tried to move towards legacy admissions we might face an alumni revolt. There is only one way into (and out of) MIT, and that’s the hard way. The people here value that.
…I personally would not work for a college which had legacy admission because I am not interested in simply reproducing a multigenerational lineage of educated elite. And if anyone in our office ever advocated for a mediocre applicant on the basis of their “excellent pedigree” they would be kicked out of the committee room.
So to be clear: if you got into MIT, it’s because you got into MIT. Simple as that."
hi all, thanks for weighing in. We can limit this to colleges that did away with it instead of ones that never used legacy admissions, since that seems to be complicating the thread.
When I did a web scrape of collegedata.com (information that appeared to be from colleges’ common data sets) in 2019, I found the following:
Type Total Legacy
Used NotUsed Unknown
All 2029 889 794 346
43.8% 39.1% 17.0%
Public 595 181 362 52
30.4% 60.8% 8.7%
Private 1217 696 364 157
57.2% 29.9% 12.9%
For 217 12 68 137
Profit 5.5% 31.3% 63.1%
“Unknown” meant that the college existed, but the relevant portion was unanswered.
Not sure whether people here want a post listing the 794 colleges that did not consider legacy in 2019. Of course, some colleges may have changed their policies since then.
U of Wyoming does give a legacy preference, and it give instate tuition to the children of grads. I considered marrying my friend just to get my daughter instate tuition.
Here is a selection of private colleges that may be somewhat well known on these forums that listed legacy as not considered in 2019:
Bennington College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Webb Institute
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Northeastern University
Berea College
Juilliard School
Brigham Young University
Curtis Institute of Music
Northeastern doesn’t explicitly mention on their website whether or not they consider legacy status. But this recent article quotes a spokesperson saying:
the university “takes a holistic view of every applicant and legacy status is just [one of] a myriad of factors we consider.”
Seems like the spokesperson at Northeastern, the admission office, and the people who write the common data set need to talk. The common data set says that alumni relation is not considered: https://provost.northeastern.edu/uds/facts/common-data-set/
I stumbled upon this article from WashPo in which it looks like both U. Maryland and Pitzer had a recent change of hearts and are currently not considering legacy:
At least two schools The Post contacted about legacy factors said Common Data Set answers posted online did not reflect their actual policy. The University of Maryland, which had originally stated on the Common Data Set for 2022-2023 that it considers alumni relationships, changed its answer this month to say it does not consider them. Pitzer College, part of the prestigious Claremont Colleges group in California, also had affirmed on the questionnaire that it considers alumni relationships.
“Pitzer College does not consider legacy (or alumni relationships) as a component in its holistic admission process,” Pitzer spokeswoman Wendy Shattuck wrote to The Post in an email. She said Pitzer changed its answer to reflect its stance.
Here is their list of schools that is currently NOT considering legacy in admissions:
Amherst College
Auburn University
Cal Tech
Carnegie Mellon
Davidson
FSU
Georgia Tech
Indiana U.
Johns Hopkins
MIT
Occidental
Ohio State
Pitzer
Pomona College
Purdue
Rutgers
Soka University of America
Texas A&M
all UCs
U. Connecticut
U. Georgia
U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign
U. Illinois Chicago
U. Maryland
U. Mass Amherst
U. Michigan
U. Pitts
UT Austin
U. Utah
U. Washington
U. Wisconsin Madison
Wesleyan University
Yeshiva U.
You’re right!