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Why Legacies Are Given Preference

It’s long been acknowledged that under-represented minorities, athletes, and alumni children are given preference in the admissions game at top colleges and universities. But it has never been clearly documented just how much institutions benefit by accepting the sons and daughters of their alumni.

A new paper by economists at Princeton and Stanford sheds some light on the role that legacy admits has on alumni giving. Mining over 30 years of data from a prestigious, private four-year undergraduate college (Princeton, I suspect), the authors take into consideration such factors as the undergraduate record of the alum, his or her current occupation, and whether or not they have a graduate degree.

And the results are striking.

In the year following the rejection of an alumnus’s child, the probability that the alum will donate money drops by close to 25 percentage points. And if the child is accepted? The probability increases by 10 percentage points.

So the lessons to an admissions committee should be fairly obvious. If you are on the fence between deciding to accept a “legacy” admit or an equally qualified candidate with no connections to the school, take the legacy admit every time. The director of alumni affairs and development will thank you for it.


Matthew Nagowski | Posted on June 15, 2007 (#)

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