Legacy admissions give alumni children a 45% acceptance rate at schools where the general rate is 5%

At highly selective universities, applicants whose parents attended the same institution — 'legacy' applicants — are admitted at rates 3-8x higher than non-legacy applicants. At Harvard, legacy applicants were admitted at 33% compared to 6% overall during the period examined in the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit. This isn't a small population: legacy applicants make up 10-15% of admitted classes at elite schools. So what? Each legacy admit displaces a non-legacy applicant who had stronger qualifications. So what? Since legacy status correlates tightly with wealth and race (alumni of elite schools are disproportionately white and affluent because those schools were disproportionately white and affluent for centuries), legacy preferences perpetuate the exact demographic composition from decades past. So what? A first-gen Black student from a low-income family must score higher, have stronger extracurriculars, and write a better essay than a legacy applicant just to reach the same admissions probability. So what? Elite universities remain engines of class reproduction rather than class mobility — Chetty's data shows more students at Ivy League schools come from the top 1% of income than the entire bottom 50%. Why does this persist? Legacy admits donate at significantly higher rates (alumni giving is a factor in U.S. News rankings), and university endowments depend on multi-generational donor relationships. Eliminating legacy would cost schools millions in annual giving.