Every Ivy League school still considers legacy status in admissions -- that part is settled, confirmed directly in each school's own Common Data Set. What's much less settled is how big an advantage it actually is at each school, because most Ivies have never published the one number that would answer that: a legacy-specific admit rate. It's one more example of how unevenly these eight schools disclose data about themselves -- see our full explainer on what the Ivy League label actually is and isn't for several others.

Two different questions, and only one of them is hard to get an answer to

"What share of the entering class is legacy?" and "what's the admit rate for legacy applicants specifically?" sound similar, but they're different measurements, and only the second one is genuinely hard to produce. The first only requires knowing who enrolled -- something every school already tracks and can report as a matter of routine. The second requires applicant-level outcome data broken out by legacy status across the entire applicant pool, which is a materially bigger disclosure most schools have no obligation to make public, and almost none volunteer.

That distinction is the whole reason this comparison looks lopsided.

What's actually disclosed, school by school

Harvard is the only Ivy with a real, applicant-level legacy admit rate on the public record, and it exists only because litigation forced it out: court records from Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard showed legacy applicants admitted at 33.6%, compared to 5.9% for non-legacy applicants over the same period -- a figure this site's own general legacy-admissions piece also covers in more depth, alongside a separate Opportunity Insights study finding legacy status accounts for a large share of the broader income-based admissions gap at "Ivy-Plus" schools generally.

Princeton has separately reported that legacy applicants were admitted at roughly 6 times its overall admit rate, based on reporting from around 2018 -- a real disclosure, but an older one, and Princeton itself has since described its current use of legacy status as comparatively limited ("sparing," in its own words) rather than a fixed, unchanging multiplier.

Yale and Dartmouth have each disclosed that legacy students make up roughly 11% of a recent entering class (the Class of 2027) -- a real number, but it's a class-composition figure, not an admit rate. It tells you legacy students exist in meaningful numbers; it says nothing about whether a legacy applicant's odds are 2x the baseline or 10x.

Columbia, Brown, Penn, and Cornell have not published either figure in a form comparable to Harvard's or Princeton's disclosures.

Why the gap exists, and why it isn't evidence of concealment

It's tempting to read "6 schools haven't disclosed this" as "6 schools are hiding something." That's not a fair reading of what's actually going on. A legacy-specific admit rate requires exactly the kind of applicant-level outcome data that becomes public almost exclusively through one of two paths: a lawsuit's discovery process (Harvard's route) or a school's own unusual, voluntary special disclosure (closer to Princeton's route, though even that wasn't as complete as Harvard's forced disclosure). Neither path is something a school controls on a predictable schedule, and the absence of a lawsuit or a voluntary special report at 6 schools says nothing in particular about how large or small legacy preference is at any of them -- it just means the specific, harder-to-produce number hasn't become public through either of those two unusual channels.

What this means for you

  • Don't treat Harvard's 33.6%/5.9% gap as representative of "the Ivy League." It's real, but it's one school's disclosed number, from one dataset -- not evidence about Yale, Columbia, or any other Ivy's actual legacy admit rate, which simply isn't public.
  • All 8 Ivies do consider legacy status right now, per their own current Common Data Set filings -- see the full 18-factor comparison for exactly how each school rates it alongside every other admission factor.
  • If you're a legacy applicant anywhere in the Ivy League, the advantage is real in principle at every one of the 8 -- but only at Harvard do you have a genuine, disclosed sense of its rough size, and even Princeton's own more recent language suggests the effect isn't fixed or uniform over time.
  • For the broader national picture -- which colleges have dropped legacy entirely, the state-level bans, and the pending federal MERIT Act -- see this site's general legacy-admissions explainer, which this piece deliberately doesn't repeat.
  • The same uneven-disclosure pattern shows up elsewhere in each school's Common Data Set, too -- checking all 8 Ivies' waitlist figures found the identical split: some schools publish the full picture, others leave key fields blank.
  • It also shows up outside the Common Data Set entirely -- only 2 of the 8 Ivies' own newspapers currently report a real early-vs-regular decision acceptance rate, the same uneven pattern in a different document.

Sources