It’s the latest elite college to stop favoring the children of alumni.
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No, and Amherst College doesn’t care. The selective school in Western MA announced that its admissions office will no longer play favorites when considering the applications of children of alumni. In other words, preference for second-generation Mammoths—which account for about 11% of each class—is going extinct.
Other elite colleges that don’t factor in applicants’ family trees include Caltech, MIT, and any school that starts with “University of California.”
But that’s far from the norm: 43% of private, nonprofit universities and 14% of public ones consider legacy status in their admissions decisions, according to a 2019 study conducted by a national admissions group. 73% of the most selective schools—ones with a 25%-or-less admission rate like Amherst—do the same.
Pressure to change that is building
This fall, students launched #LeaveYourLegacy campaigns at Harvard and Brown, asking alumni to boycott donations until the schools stop caring about your last name. And just last week, Colorado passed a bill banning preference for applicants with alumni relatives at all public schools in the state.
Critics of legacy admissions argue the practice disproportionately favors white, wealthy applicants and takes admissions spots away from those who are less privileged, but academically more deserving.
- At Johns Hopkins University, which started phasing out legacy preference in 2014 and completely nixed it in 2019, the proportion of accepted students whose parents were alumni more than halved from 2013 to this year, while its share of first-generation students more than doubled.
- In a civil case that accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants in 2018, an economist hired by the plaintiffs said that Harvard accepted legacy applicants at a rate 5x higher than it did nonlegacy applicants. Over one-third of Harvard’s Class of 2022 had alumni parents.
Proponents of legacy admissions keep their reasoning simple: It’s smart financially, encouraging alumni donations and continued engagement with the school.
Looking ahead…Amherst’s change will go into effect for the 2022–2023 school year.—JW
