What happens to a selective college’s entering class when the children of its alumni stop getting a thumb on the scale? For most of the last century nobody could answer, because almost no selective college stopped. That has changed fast. Johns Hopkins began phasing out the preference in 2014, Amherst followed in 2021, and the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling against race-conscious admissions was followed by a run of announcements from Wesleyan, Occidental, Virginia Tech, the University of Minnesota and dozens of less famous campuses. Five states have written bans into law. In California, Stanford and USC have kept the preference anyway, one by walking away from state grant money and the other by declining to comply with the statute.
This report gathers what the record shows. The evidence is uneven. Colleges almost never publish how many legacy applicants they receive, admit or enroll, and the federal government only began asking whether colleges consider legacy status at all in the 2022-23 IPEDS collection cycle. What exists is a national count of which colleges still use the preference, a handful of institutions that published legacy shares before and after a change, and a set of state laws whose first effects are now visible.
Read together, those sources support three findings. Where the preference was large, ending it cut the legacy share of the class by half or more within a few years. At Johns Hopkins that drop coincided with large gains in socioeconomic diversity; Amherst also posted record first-generation representation, though the immediate increase was much smaller. Where the preference was small, or where a state law reached campuses that had barely used it, the legacy share moved by a point or less. And two of the most prominent holdouts, Stanford and USC, still enroll unusually large legacy populations, although Virginia Tech, where legacies made up more than a fifth of the class, shows that even a very high legacy share does not stop a university from walking away.
A practice in retreat
Education Reform Now, a nonprofit that has tracked legacy policies since 2015 using Common Data Set filings and federal data, counted 420 four-year colleges still considering legacy status in its February 2025 brief. That is 24 percent of four-year institutions, down from 29 percent in 2022 and 49 percent in 2015. Since 2015, 452 colleges have dropped the practice, a 52 percent decline. Ninety-two of them stopped between 2022 and 2023, the cycle of the Supreme Court decision, an 18 percent drop from the 2022 count.
Figure 1. Share of four-year colleges that consider legacy status in admissions
Source: Education Reform Now, Future of Fair Admissions Issue Brief 5 (February 2025), drawn from Common Data Set filings and IPEDS. ERN did not publish annual shares for the years between those shown.
Most of the change was voluntary. By ERN’s count, 86 percent of the colleges that stopped did so on their own and 14 percent because a state required it. The practice now sits overwhelmingly in the private sector. ERN counts 358 private nonprofit colleges that consider legacy status, 30 percent of that sector, against 62 public institutions, or 11 percent. In 24 states no public college offers a legacy preference at all.
Figure 2. Four-year colleges still considering legacy status, by sector, 2025
Source: Education Reform Now, Issue Brief 5 (February 2025). Share = institutions considering legacy status divided by all four-year institutions in the sector.
The national decline overstates how far the most competitive end of the market has moved. Many of the colleges that dropped the preference admit most of their applicants, where a bonus for alumni children decided few outcomes. ERN reports that legacy preference persists most strongly at the most selective institutions, more than half of which still use it. Every Ivy League university still considered legacy status as of 2025, the Associated Press reported.
The Common Data Set is also an imperfect guide to who has stopped. Higher Ed Dive, summarizing the ERN research, noted that colleges have at times made ambiguous or erroneous entries on the alumni-relation line. The University of Pittsburgh is a clean example. A spokesman told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2023 that Pitt’s admissions staff had stopped considering legacy in 2020, while the university’s filings had continued to list it as a factor. Carnegie Mellon went the other way, marking alumni relation as not considered in its 2022-23 filing without ever announcing a change.
How the bans spread
| State | Signed | Colleges covered | Notes |
| Colorado | 2021 | Public | First state; 8 of 12 public institutions already did not consider family ties |
| Virginia | Mar. 8, 2024 | Public | Effective July 1, 2024; Virginia Tech had dropped legacy voluntarily in 2023 |
| Maryland | Apr. 2024 | Public and private | Effective July 1, 2024; Johns Hopkins and UMD already did not use legacy |
| Illinois | Aug. 2024 | Public | Fourth state to enact a ban |
| California | Sept. 30, 2024 | Private nonprofit colleges tied to state aid | Effective Sept. 1, 2025; University of California dropped legacy in 1998 |
Source: Chalkbeat (June 2021), WHRO (November 2024), Hechinger Report (April 2024), NAICU (August 2024), Stanford Daily (October 2024), Higher Ed Dive (August 2025). Maryland’s exact signing day was not reported in the sources reviewed.
Colorado went first, in 2021, and its law changed less than the headlines suggested. Chalkbeat reported at the time that eight of the state’s 12 public institutions already did not consider family ties, and that CU Boulder and the University of Northern Colorado had dropped the practice within the previous two years. The four that still asked were Colorado State, the Colorado School of Mines, Colorado Mesa and Western Colorado, three of which admitted roughly four of every five applicants.
CU Boulder offers a hint of what the symbolic changes can do at the application stage. It dropped legacy consideration at the same time it went test-optional, and Chalkbeat reported that applications afterward rose 24 percent among students of color and 11 percent among first-generation students. The two policies arrived together, so the gain cannot be credited to either one alone.
The 2024 laws in Virginia and Illinois followed the same public-only pattern. Maryland’s reached private colleges too, though its two best-known research universities were already out. The Hechinger Report counted a dozen Maryland institutions still considering legacy when the law passed, among them the U.S. Naval Academy, Loyola University Maryland and Goucher College. California’s AB 1780 is the only law aimed at elite private universities, and it is the one being openly resisted.
More bills are coming. ERN reported that at least five states would consider legacy bans in 2025 and that every legacy bill to reach a floor vote had passed. The Hechinger Report listed New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Connecticut among the states weighing their own versions. New York carries the most weight for selective admissions, since ERN counts more legacy-using colleges there than in any other state. In Washington, Senators Todd Young and Tim Kaine, who first introduced the MERIT Act in 2023, reintroduced it in July 2026 with Tim Scott, Raphael Warnock, John Kennedy and Andy Kim as cosponsors. The bill would add an accreditation standard barring preferential treatment for the relatives of alumni or donors and would require a study of better data collection on legacy admissions. No federal ban has become law.
Johns Hopkins, the longest test
Hopkins began moving away from legacy preference around 2014 and went public with the change in January 2020. Its figures are the closest thing the field has to a clean before-and-after record. In 2009, legacies made up 12.5 percent of the Hopkins first-year class, according to the Christian Science Monitor. By 2019 they were 3.5 percent.
Inside Higher Ed, using university figures, reported a second set of comparisons. In 2013, the year before the phase-out began, first-generation students were 8.1 percent of the class and 12.8 percent of the class was Pell-eligible. In the class that entered in fall 2021, with the policy fully in place, those figures were 17.8 and 20.1 percent. The same report put legacies at 8.5 percent of admitted students in 2013 and 3.7 percent of the fall 2021 class, a comparison across different denominators that points the same direction as the Monitor’s figures.
Figure 3. First-generation and Pell-eligible shares of the Johns Hopkins entering class, 2013 versus fall 2021
Source: Johns Hopkins figures reported by Inside Higher Ed (October 2021). Both measures are shares of the entering class. Legacy shares appear in Figure 6, where both years use the same denominator.
The gains kept going after 2021. Hopkins reported that 23.8 percent of the class entering in fall 2024 was Pell-eligible, and 24.1 percent of the Class of 2029, which entered in fall 2025, the highest in the university’s history. More than 31.8 percent of that class was first-generation or low-income. The Hechinger Report put legacies below 2 percent of Hopkins enrollees by 2022.
Figure 4. Pell-eligible share of the Johns Hopkins entering class
Source: Inside Higher Ed (2013 and fall 2021 figures); Johns Hopkins Hub, December 2025 (fall 2024 and fall 2025). The dotted segment spans years for which no figure was found; it is not interpolated data.
Legacy policy was not the only thing that changed at Hopkins. In November 2018 Michael Bloomberg gave the university $1.8 billion for undergraduate financial aid, which allowed it to admit students without regard to ability to pay and to replace loans with scholarships. Some of the Pell gain belongs to that gift, and the published record cannot separate the two effects. The legacy decline is more directly tied to the policy change than the Pell increase, but a large aid expansion can reshape the applicant pool and who accepts an offer, so even that comparison is not a controlled experiment. The preference ended and the legacy share fell by more than half.
Ending legacy preference also did not shield Hopkins from the effects of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling. The university reported that its share of students from underrepresented groups peaked in fall 2023 and fell significantly in each of the next two classes. Black students made up 4 percent of the Class of 2029 and Hispanic students 10.1 percent, even as the Pell-eligible share set a record. Income diversity and racial diversity moved in opposite directions once race-conscious admission ended.
Amherst and the liberal arts colleges
Amherst announced in October 2021 that it would end the preference it had given alumni children since the 1920s, and paired the decision with an expanded aid program. Legacies had made up about 11 percent of each class. The Class of 2027, the first admitted without the preference, was about 6 percent legacy and 19 percent first-generation, the largest first-generation share in the college’s modern history, according to dean of admission Matthew McGann. The Class of 2025, admitted with the preference still in place, had been about 18 percent first-generation, so the first class admitted without the preference was about one point more first-generation while its legacy share fell nearly by half.
The first-generation numbers have continued to climb. Amherst reported that 25 percent of the students it admitted to the Class of 2029 were the first in their families to attend a four-year college, again a modern record, drawn from a record 15,818 applications. That figure counts admitted students while the 19 percent counts the enrolled class, so the two are not directly comparable. McGann said in 2023 that it was too early to judge whether the change would alter the racial makeup of the class. That caution applies to every school in this report, since the Supreme Court decision landed in the same window.
The colleges that followed Amherst after June 2023 have published far less. Most announced within weeks of the ruling, and none has released a legacy share for a class admitted under the new policy.
| Institution | Announced | Legacy share before the change |
| Wesleyan University | July 19, 2023 | About 7% of matriculants (president’s rough estimate) |
| Occidental College | July 26, 2023 | 8% to 11% of first-year classes, 2014 to 2023; 11.3% of the Class of 2027 |
| Virginia Tech | July 28, 2023 | Over 20% of the incoming class |
| University of Minnesota Twin Cities | July 2023 | Not published |
| Carnegie Mellon University | No announcement; 2022-23 CDS | Typically under 10% (former dean) |
Source: Wesleyan Argus (July 2023); The Occidental (September 2023); BestColleges (August 2023); MPR News (July 2023); Philadelphia Inquirer (July 2023). Occidental’s Class of 2027 share = 60 students with family ties divided by 533 first-year students.
Occidental’s history shows why a single year would be hard to read even if the data appeared. Its legacy share ranged from 8 to 11 percent across the decade before the change, fell to 6 percent in 2021 during the pandemic, and rebounded to 11.3 percent in the Class of 2027, all with the preference still in place.
Where the preference was largest
Virginia Tech gave the most revealing single statistic of any school that dropped legacy. Announcing the change in July 2023, its admissions office said legacies made up about 12 percent of applications and more than 20 percent of the incoming class. The same announcement ended Virginia Tech’s early decision program.
Figure 5. Legacies at Virginia Tech before the 2023 change
Source: Virginia Tech statement reported by BestColleges (August 2023). Figures as stated by the university; it did not publish exact counts.
A gap that wide reflects more than a tiebreaker. Legacy applicants at Virginia Tech were admitted, enrolled, or both at well above the rate of everyone else. Research on the most selective private universities puts a number on that kind of advantage. Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman studied admissions at 12 Ivy-Plus colleges in work released by Opportunity Insights in 2023 and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in February 2026. Comparing applicants with similar SAT and ACT scores, they found that legacy applicants were far more likely to be admitted to their parents’ college, especially when their parents had high incomes; Rolling Stone’s coverage of the 2023 release put the gap at roughly four times. Legacy preference was one of three factors behind the admissions advantage of high-income applicants, alongside recruited athletes and the weight given to nonacademic ratings. The edge did not transfer. Alumni children had no extra chance at the other Ivy-Plus colleges, only at their parents’ alma mater.
| Institution | Measure | Legacy share | Period |
| Virginia Tech | Incoming class | Over 20% | 2023 statement |
| USC | Enrolled first-years (preference retained) | 14.5% | Fall 2025 |
| Stanford | Admits with alumni or donor ties | 13.6% | Fall 2023 |
| Johns Hopkins | Enrolled first-years | 12.5% | 2009 |
| Occidental | Enrolled first-years | 11.3% | Class of 2027 |
| Amherst | Each class, recent average | About 11% | Before 2021 |
| William & Mary | Entering class | 8.2% | Fall 2023 |
| Wesleyan | Matriculants, president’s rough estimate | About 7% | 2023 |
Source: BestColleges; Daily Trojan; Stanford Daily citing Stanford’s AB 697 report; Christian Science Monitor; The Occidental; Amherst Bulletin; WHRO; Wesleyan Argus. Measures differ by school and are not directly comparable; Stanford’s figure includes donor ties.
Read against that table, the pattern in the outcomes makes sense. Hopkins and Amherst gave up a preference that was filling roughly a tenth of each class, and their legacy shares fell by half or more. Stanford and USC, which sit near the top of the list, are the two that have refused to stop. Virginia Tech, at the very top, is the counterexample. A legacy share above 20 percent did not keep it from dropping the preference, and the decision came a year before Virginia’s law would have forced it.
When the law arrives first
Virginia’s ban offers the best look at what happens when a statute ends the preference. The law took effect July 1, 2024, in time for that fall’s entering class, and admissions deans told WHRO that November that it had made little difference. At William & Mary, where legacies had made up 8 to 9 percent of recent classes, the share fell from 8.2 percent to 7.6 percent. The University of Virginia’s dean of admission said its legacy share dropped by about one percentage point and gave no exact figures.
The Virginia Military Institute reported a larger move over a longer period. Four percent of its fall 2024 class had an alumni parent, down from 6 percent seven years earlier, and the share with other alumni relatives fell from 19 to 13 percent. VMI said legacy status had counted for about 4 percent of its weighted admissions score before the law removed it.
Figure 6. Legacy share before and after the change, four institutions
Source: Christian Science Monitor (Johns Hopkins first-year classes, 2009 and 2019); Amherst Bulletin (Amherst); WHRO, November 2024 (VMI and William & Mary). VMI counts alumni parents only and spans seven years, so part of its decline predates the law.
The published figures do not say why the Virginia changes were so small. One plausible explanation is that many legacy applicants to William & Mary and UVA were competitive without the preference and kept applying, so removing the bonus changed relatively few outcomes. Confirming that would require admit rates for legacy and non-legacy applicants, which neither university has released. The Colorado law, which reached campuses that had mostly abandoned the practice already, moved even less.
California, and the two universities that kept it
California’s University of California campuses dropped legacy preference in 1998, so AB 1780 was written for the state’s private universities. Governor Gavin Newsom signed it on September 30, 2024, and it took effect September 1, 2025. It bars legacy and donor preferences at private nonprofit colleges that receive state-funded student aid or enroll students who do. An early draft would have cut violators off from the Cal Grant program. The final version carried no money penalty. Every covered institution must instead report each year, starting June 30, 2026, whether it complied. Violators must add admission rates for applicants with and without legacy or donor ties and a demographic breakdown of newly enrolled students, and the state Department of Justice must post their names by the following fiscal year.
Stanford’s own reporting under an earlier state disclosure law showed that 13.6 percent of the students it admitted for fall 2023 had a legacy or donor tie, in a year when it admitted just under 4 percent of applicants. On July 29, 2025, Stanford said it would stop accepting state student aid, including Cal Grants, and replace that money with university scholarships, which took it outside the law’s reach. Its students had received $3.2 million in Cal Grant funds in 2022-23, the Stanford Daily reported, citing the Los Angeles Times. The university said it would continue to consider alumni and donor ties for the class entering in fall 2026.
USC took the more direct route. Interim President Beong-Soo Kim told campus media that the university would keep considering legacy status as part of its holistic review, calling the alternative perverse. Legacies made up 14.5 percent of USC’s 2025-26 first-year class, 545 students, in line with the 13 to 15 percent range the university has reported since 2020. Because USC kept the preference, it was required to file its first disclosure, including the comparative admit-rate data that no selective private university has published voluntarily, by June 30, 2026. Those figures had not surfaced in public sources reviewed for this report as of October 2026.
The fundraising question
The most common argument for keeping legacy preference is money, on the theory that alumni give more when their children have a better shot at admission. The colleges that dropped it have not reported the decline that argument predicts. David Phillips, Hopkins’s vice provost for admissions and financial aid, told NPR in 2020 that the university saw no correlation between legacy preference and alumni giving, while acknowledging that some alumni were unhappy with the change. An earlier analysis of giving at top universities, by Chad Coffman, Tara O’Neil and Brian Starr, found no evidence that legacy preferences themselves increase giving; the apparent link reflected the wealth of the students admitted.
Neither source settles the question for a university like Stanford, which has paid to keep the preference. Both suggest the fear has outrun the evidence at the schools that have actually tested it.
What the record means for applicants
If you are the child of an alumnus applying to a school that has dropped the preference, plan as if the connection carries no weight, because by policy it does not. The Virginia figures show legacies still filling nearly the same share of the class without it. Apply on the strength of the record, and do not count on the family tie to break a close call.
If you are a first-generation or Pell-eligible student, the schools that ended legacy preference years ago have posted record shares of students like you. Hopkins reached a record 24.1 percent Pell-eligible in fall 2025, and first-generation students made up 25 percent of Amherst’s admits to the Class of 2029. Those figures make both universities worth a close look for students who put socioeconomic diversity and strong need-based aid near the top of their list, with the caveat that both remain extremely selective.
Check a school’s policy directly rather than relying on its reputation or a headline. The alumni relation line in section C7 of the Common Data Set is the place to start, but it has been wrong before, so confirm it against the admissions office’s own statements. State law settles the question only at public colleges in Colorado, Virginia and Illinois, at every college in Maryland, and at California private colleges that follow AB 1780.
At Stanford, USC and the Ivy League, legacy status still counts. At USC, legacies were 14.5 percent of the 2025-26 first-year class; at Stanford, 13.6 percent of fall 2023 admits had an alumni or donor tie, a figure that combines the two. Non-legacy applicants to those universities are competing for a class in which alumni children hold a measurable advantage, and they should build their lists with that in mind. Watch for California’s AB 1780 disclosures. Once released, USC’s filing will be the first published admit-rate comparison between legacy and non-legacy applicants at a major private university.
National figures are from Education Reform Now’s February 2025 brief, which draws on Common Data Set filings and IPEDS. Institutional figures are as reported by the institutions or by the publications cited beneath each table and chart; measures differ by school and are noted where they do. Colleges do not routinely publish legacy application, admission or enrollment counts, and no school in this report has released a legacy share for a class admitted after a post-2023 policy change. Figures are current as of October 2026.
