Legacy admissions is simultaneously in retreat and still enormous, depending entirely on which school you're looking at. Nationally, the practice is fading fast. At exactly the handful of schools "chance me" threads obsess over most, it's still one of the single largest documented advantages in admissions. Both things are true at the same time, and the difference matters for how you should actually think about it.

What legacy admissions is

A legacy applicant is someone with a parent (sometimes a grandparent) who attended the school they're applying to. A "legacy preference" means the admissions office gives that connection real weight in the decision -- not just as a tiebreaker, but as a documented factor in who gets in. Harvard's admissions lawsuit revealed the practice often travels with a broader cluster of similar preferences -- athletes, legacies, applicants on the dean's interest list, and children of faculty or staff, sometimes grouped internally as "ALDC" -- but legacy specifically is what most people mean by the term.

The national decline, by the numbers

As of 2026, only 24% of four-year colleges still consider legacy status in admissions -- down from 29% in 2022 and 49% just a decade earlier, in 2015. Roughly 452 colleges have dropped the practice since 2015, and 92 of those dropped it specifically after the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling ending race-conscious affirmative action (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), which put new legal and public scrutiny on every other admissions preference schools use -- see our piece on what that ruling actually changed for the specifics of the ruling itself.

Some schools got there earlier and on their own: Johns Hopkins eliminated legacy preference in 2020, Pomona College in 2017, Carnegie Mellon in July 2023, and Amherst College in 2021. MIT and Caltech have never used legacy preference, and the University of California system dropped it for all campuses back in 1998.

Five states have banned it outright -- but the bans don't all cover the same schools

This is where a lot of coverage gets vague, and the details actually matter:

  • Colorado (2021) and Virginia (2024) ban legacy preference at public universities only.
  • Illinois (2024) banned it at public universities too, with a 2025 bill proposed to extend the ban to private schools as well.
  • Maryland (2024) goes further -- its ban covers any institution that receives state funding, public or private.
  • California's law, effective September 2025, targets private nonprofit colleges that accept state-funded financial aid; California's public universities had already dropped legacy preference on their own back in 1998.

So a state ban doesn't automatically mean every school in that state stopped -- it depends on whether the school is public, and whether it takes state financial aid money. Connecticut has been considering similar legislation but hadn't passed it as of this writing.

There's also a federal bill, but it hasn't passed

A bipartisan group of senators -- Republicans Todd Young, Tim Scott, and John Kennedy, and Democrats Tim Kaine, Raphael Warnock, and Andy Kim -- reintroduced the MERIT Act in 2026, after a similar version failed to gain traction when first introduced in 2023. The bill would tie a college's accreditation to not giving preferential treatment based on alumni or donor relationships, with exemptions for HBCUs, tribal colleges, and other minority-serving institutions. It has bipartisan sponsors, which improves its odds compared to past attempts, but it hasn't passed, and a divided Congress makes any higher-ed legislation a longer shot.

Where it still exists, it's a genuinely large advantage -- not a myth

This is the part worth taking seriously if you or your family attended a school that still practices legacy preference. Two independent sources of hard data agree on this:

Harvard's own admissions data, produced during the SFFA lawsuit, showed legacy applicants admitted at nearly 34% from 2009 to 2015, compared to just 5.9% for non-legacy applicants over the same period -- a gap of more than five and a half times.

A landmark study by Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman (using Opportunity Insights' access to real admissions data across many "Ivy-Plus" schools) found that a legacy applicant with the same SAT score, demographics, and admissions-office rating as a non-legacy applicant is roughly five times more likely to be admitted to the specific school their parent attended. The study found legacy preference is the single largest factor behind the broader finding that top-1%-income applicants get into Ivy-Plus schools at twice the rate of middle-class applicants with identical test scores -- legacy preference alone accounts for 46% of that entire advantage, more than athletic recruiting or any other factor measured.

The crucial caveat: that advantage is specific to the one school your parent attended. The same study found legacy applicants get no boost at all at other selective schools where their parents didn't go. It's not a general "well-connected family" bonus -- it's a one-school relationship, and only that school treats it as one.

Who still actually uses it, right now

As of 2025-2026, none of the Ivy League has formally abolished legacy preference. Harvard still considers it, and it's reportedly most influential in Harvard's Restrictive Early Action round specifically. Yale still considers it too, even as its own student government has passed resolutions urging the university to drop it -- a sign of real internal pressure that hasn't yet changed the policy. Princeton says it still factors legacy in, but describes its use as "sparing" and limited in effect. In short: legacy preference is fading nationally, but it's still fully alive at several of the most selective schools in the country.

What this means for you

  • If you're a legacy applicant at a school that still practices this, take it seriously as a real factor -- the data above isn't folklore, it's from the schools' own admissions records and rigorous outside research. But understand it applies to that one school specifically, not as general leverage anywhere else on your list. This makes it function like the "hook" described in our spike vs. hook breakdown -- something you didn't build, that only counts at one specific place.
  • If you're not a legacy anywhere, this is exactly the kind of advantage that's genuinely outside your control -- and it's a shrinking one nationally, even if it's still large at a handful of highly selective schools. Focus your energy on where your actual academic profile puts you at each school instead of an advantage you don't have.
  • Check your specific state and school before assuming anything. Whether legacy preference is legal, banned, or simply not practiced depends on where the school is, whether it's public or private, and whether your state has passed a law covering it -- national headlines about "banning legacy admissions" don't mean it's banned everywhere, or even everywhere in that state.

If you're specifically comparing the 8 Ivy League schools, see which of them have actually disclosed a legacy admit rate -- only 2 of 8 have, and this piece covers why that gap exists and isn't itself evidence of anything.

Sources