President Donald Trump has been attacking American universities on a host of fronts, pressuring schools to end their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, cutting National Institutes of Health research grants, and threatening to increase the endowment tax. One thing he hasn’t touched? The deeply troubling practice of legacy preferences, which provide a large admissions boost to the children of alumni. Trump says he stands for “merit,” but he’s done nothing to curb a practice that piles additional advantages on the already advantaged.
Legacy preferences are a sordid business, which began in the early 20th century as an effort to cap Jewish enrollment at selective college.
Legacy preferences are a sordid business, which began in the early 20th century as an effort to cap Jewish enrollment at selective college. I had a chance to observe closely how these preferences work when I served as an expert witness in lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina for using race in admissions. As I outline in my new book, “Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges,” I testified that racial diversity is important for college campuses, and that universities could create that diversity without racial preferences if they eliminated favoritism for wealthy (mostly white) applicants and boosted the admissions chances of working-class students of all races.
Harvard had long claimed that legacy preferences were a mere “tiebreaker” among equally qualified candidates, but an internal study I cited as part of my court report found that legacies received a 40% boost in admissions, meaning a student with a 15% chance of admissions as a nonlegacy had around a 55% chance if he or she were a legacy.
In the lawsuit, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the university’s expert, Ruth Simmons, the former president of Brown University, claimed that legacy preferences were necessary to enhance the “enthusiasm” of alumni networks. But she did not explain why it was necessary to bribe alumni with a preference for their children to generate such enthusiasm. Nor did she explain why excellent institutions such as Caltech, UC Berkeley, Oxford, and Cambridge — all of which have been ranked among the best universities in the world — managed to survive without heaping preferences on the children of alumni.
In fact, the empirical evidence mostly ran in the other direction. A 2010 analysis of the top 100 universities in U.S. News & World Report found “no evidence that legacy preference policies themselves exert an influence on giving behavior.” An interesting 2007 study from researchers at Princeton and Stanford found that alumni increased their giving when their children were in high school but then lowered or eliminated donations entirely if the students were rejected. Alumni were outraged to be told that even with a preference, their children were not good enough.
Harvard’s other argument in favor of legacy preferences from the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit was astonishing: that they increase diversity of perspectives. College dean Rakesh Khurana claimed that it was important for Harvard to favor the children of alumni to bring together students who “have more experience with Harvard” with “others who are less familiar with Harvard.” The ability of these different groups to “exchange perspectives, points of view,” he claimed without providing evidence, would make “them more effective citizens and citizen leaders for society.”
Harvard also created a special “dean’s interest list” each year that included applicants who were related to or of interest to big donors. The admission rate was 42% for students on the dean’s admissions list, compared with 6% for those not on it; 67% of these students were white, and around 3% were Black. If a white student had a 10% chance of admission on the merits, those odds shot up to 75% if they were on the dean’s interest list.
Internal emails and testimony introduced at trial showed how the system worked. In one email, with the subject line “My Hero,” David Ellwood, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, expressed appreciation to admissions dean Bill Fitzsimmons. “Once again you have done wonders. I am simply thrilled about the folks you were able to admit,” Ellwood said. “[Redacted] and [redacted] are all big wins. [Redacted] has already committed to a building.” All this embarrassing evidence highlighted how Harvard tilted the admissions process toward wealthy white people, undercutting Harvard’s claim that the only possible way it could create racial diversity was through racial preferences.
Given all this positive momentum, it’s startling that every Ivy League college has so far bucked the trend.
When the Harvard and UNC cases made their way to the Supreme Court in 2023, the justices ruled against them and outlawed racial preferences nationwide. In response to the decision, dozens of schools, from Wesleyan to Virginia Tech, said they could no longer justify employing legacy preferences that tend to benefit white students. According to nonprofit Education Reform Now, between 2015 and 2024, the share of colleges employing legacy preferences was cut in half. Virginia, Illinois, Maryland and California passed legislation outlawing legacy preferences. In the U.S. Senate, two sets of bipartisan legislators, Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Todd Young, R-Ind., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ohio and John Kennedy, R-La., introduced legislation to outlaw legacy preferences nationwide.
Given all this positive momentum, it’s startling that every Ivy League college has so far bucked the trend and stubbornly held on to their policy of preferences for legacies. Even Brown University, which saw a major drop in racial diversity after the Supreme Court decision outlawing racial affirmative action, has maintained its legacy preference policy. When state legislation to curb legacy preferences failed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, home to Harvard and Yale, the opposition of “Ivy League institutions” was reportedly part of the reason.
Favoring mostly white and wealthy children of alumni was always very difficult to defend, which is why a 2022 poll found 75% of Americans oppose the practice. But in a post affirmative action world, legacy preferences became, in the words of one college president “obscene.” It is time for this anachronistic practice to go. A U.S. president claiming to support meritocracy should be leading the way.
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