I’m a Questbridge Student. Legacy Admissions Shouldn’t Be Caricatured.

University of Washington graduating class, Seattle, 1898. Photo Credit: University of Washington.

A liberal arts college with hardly over a thousand students and a billion dollar endowment, one-fifth of Claremont McKenna’s student body was drawn from the top 1% in 2017. This was not my reality. Neither of my parents completed high school, so how could I have ended up in Claremont? After a low-income upbringing, I owe my presence here to the Questbridge scholarship program for underprivileged students. Programs like this are made possible in part by the boons of legacy admissions.

In the way the story is usually told, I should be just the type of student to be celebrating the law signed last fall by Governor Newsom prohibiting admissions preferences for the children of alumni (“legacy”) in college admissions. Instead, I wonder if the law is a step too far. I have consistently noticed that the paramount issue for first generation college students, particularly outside of tight-knit CMC, is a lack of community. We are too easily swept away by impersonal systems with which we are uniquely unfamiliar compared to our more privileged peers. Legacy students, who typically perform no worse academically than other students, and even perform better at institutions such as Princeton, are key aspects of building just the sort of strong collegiate community that acts as a safety net for underprivileged students. 

Attending one of the most expensive institutions in the nation is an opportunity made available for low-income students only through the generosity of donors. Legacy admissions is part of the relationship that makes such resource-intensive mobility broadly viable. The presence of legacy admissions signals to would-be donors that they’d be investing in a community, not merely a teaching or research institution, and thus incentivizes gift-giving. 

Further, legacy preferences emphasize that alumni investment is a two-way street. University education in the Anglosphere has always maintained a fundamental element of communitarian society building. In contrast, the German model puts research and publication above all. Our education model recognizes that we are interconnected beings in a social fabric, not atomized individuals. The strength of American civil society has always been grounded in our institutions of higher education, beginning with the Puritans who built more colleges in their ramshackle colonies than old England had until the 19th-century.

These colleges have always been more than academic institutions. They provide training in the mores of professional environments, access to career networks, and bestow other benefits buttressed by a strong campus community. This acculturation into professional norms does as much for low-income students such as myself as the academic instruction. The networks colleges build have been directly correlated with successful economic mobility. The presence of legacy admits bolsters the networks necessary to turn promising but disadvantaged admits into long-term successes. 

Evidence suggests that the degree to which legacy admissions benefits donor families is often overstated. It builds community to encourage donations, but, in Claremont at least, it does not lead to the admission of students otherwise not admitted. Legacy admits have been below 10% of Claremont McKenna’s incoming classes in the years immediately prior to the prohibition of legacy admissions. They comprise a mere 3% of the students in my year, the class of 2028. While the precise details of the admissions processes of the Claremont Colleges remain generally under wraps, most reports describing the mechanics of admissions at institutions across the nation indicate that legacy status is only factored in when deciding between multiple candidates judged as worthy of admission. This does not give candidates that would be otherwise unqualified a free pass, but merely acts as a marginal factor in the decision making process. By all accounts, legacy functions as a tiebreaker between equally qualified applicants, not a pole to vault weak applicants ahead of their peers.

Pitzer and Scripps, with their much smaller endowments, have little choice but to be need-aware if they want to have the funds to meet the needs of the lower-income students they admit. Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, and Pomona are all able to be need-blind and meet 100% of students' financial aid needs. These colleges have these funds in part because of their longstanding histories of admitting students from legacy backgrounds. Pomona voluntarily ended legacy admission in 2017, while Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd were forced to terminate the practice under the new law. Legacy admissions were part and parcel of their wider donation-seeking strategies. 

The Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision against affirmative action preserves the ability to recognize race in college admissions as a part of wider life experience. California can hopefully reach a similar legal equilibrium with legacy, as opposed to prohibiting institutions from considering pre-existing campus community connections whatsoever. Retaining legacy admissions as part of a wider holistic approach may open doors for students from underprivileged backgrounds. 

The author met with CMC alumnus Desmond Mantle (‘23, Stanford Law School ‘26) to learn the background of college associational rights for this article.

This article was published in conjunction with The Forum.