Which Colleges Consider Legacy Status

For our Future of Fair Admissions Issue Brief 5: Legacy Admissions, we looked at all four-year public and private institutions, as identified by the Department of Education’s College Scorecard “Predominant Degree Offered” designation, in the fifty states and the District of Columbia. We identified 1,769 institutions in our total data set for this brief. This table includes the response these institutions gave to the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Survey (IPEDS) question asking whether a college considered legacy status in its admissions process. If an institution left the field blank, we counted it as not considering legacy status. The institutions that left the response blank have an open admissions process and so, by definition, do not provide a legacy preference or any preferences at all in admissions. The table also reflects the bans on legacy preferences passed in California, Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia after the most recent IPEDS survey.  Finally, we reached out to a few institutions to confirm their response in IPEDS to the question about legacy status because we suspected an error in their report. The University of Central Washington and the University of Minnesota-Duluth both indicated that their IPEDS report was incorrect and that they do not consider legacy status in their admissions process.