Top 41 Schools That Don’t Have Legacy Admissions

Since the SCOTUS decision that ended affirmative action, legacy admission has caused a lot of consternation. One notable report by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming (both Harvard) and John N. Friedman (Brown University) revealed that kids from the richest one percent of American families are more than twice as likely to attend the country’s most elite private universities compared to middle-class students with similar test scores.  Experts have also said the abolition of legacy admission could transform the entire college admissions process completely. 

While some schools like Amherst College have just recently ended the practice, others (the entire UC system) have banned it for decades. The UC Schools ended legacy preferences after the state banned affirmative action in public education in the mid-90s. Other schools, like Texas A&M, followed suit.

The Washington Post recently reported on schools that don’t consider legacy admissions based on a Common Data Set questionnaire colleges answer every year for analysts. We took the schools on the list that said they do not consider legacy status in the admissions process and ranked them based on U.S. News & World Reports 2022-2023 college rankings.  

  1. MIT  

  2. Johns Hopkins

  3. Cal Tech

  4. UC-Berkeley

  5. UCLA

  6. Carnegie Mellon

  7. Michigan

  8. UC-Santa Barbara

  9. UC-Irvine 

  10. UT Austin

  11. UC-Davis  

  12. University of Wisconsin at Madison

  13. Georgia Tech

  14. Georgia

  15. Ohio State 

  16. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  17. Purdue

  18. Florida State 

  19. Maryland

  20. Rutgers

  21. University of Washington

  22. University of Pittsburgh

  23. Amherst College (eliminated for fall 2023)

  24. Texas A&M

  25. University of Connecticut

  26. U Mass Amherst

  27. Yeshiva University 

  28. Indiana

  29. UC- Santa Cruz 

  30. UC-Riverside 

  31. Auburn

  32. University of Illinois Chicago

  33. UC-Merced

  34. UC-San Diego

  35. University of Utah 

  36.  *Davidson College

  37.  *Occidental

  38.  *Pitzer

  39.  *Pomona

  40.  *Soka University of America

  41.  *Wesleyan

*Denotes they are not ranked by US News & World 

What the List Tells Us

According to the Washington Post, the Common Data Set responses also showed that most prominent schools highlighted course rigor and GPA as being “important” or “very important” factors in the admissions process. Throughout the pandemic, test scores also faced scrutiny and many universities have continued to make them optional. That’s in no small part due to criticism that tests favor students who come from wealthy backgrounds (often white students) whose families can afford private tutoring, books, and testing classes. Now that affirmative action has been made defunct, universities have additional interest in promoting equity and leveling the playing field for students from marginalized groups and backgrounds to gain admission.

But the desire to diversify classes (racially, ethnically, and socio-economically) is sometimes at odds with one truism: colleges are businesses and they’re very interested in growing their endowments. In the next several years, the public can expect to see more and more research on whether or not offering legacy admission actually promotes donations from alumni. But the real data points to watch are just how the Supreme Court decision affects class diversity and whether or not schools can counteract the fallout (at least in part) by doing away with legacy admission, which greatly favors white students from wealthy households.

 

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