Langshaw | In defense of legacy admissions
To begin, I am not a legacy student. My place at Stanford was not influenced by alumni ties or inherited affiliation. Like most students who recently went through the process, I did not experience college admissions as a clean meritocracy. It felt opaque, unpredictable and deeply frustrating. Outcomes hinge on factors applicants never see. The system is flawed, and needs change to be sustainable and equitable. However, focusing on legacy admissions fans the smoke while leaving the underlying fire of inequality untouched. The debate over legacy admissions is usually framed as a moral reckoning. Critics contend that giving any preference to applicants with alumni parents undermines meritocracy and entrenches inequality. Supporters respond defensively, if at all. Both sides tend to miss the more important question. The issue is not whether legacy admissions is fair in the abstract. Of course it isn’t. Rather, it is whether legacy admissions serve a legitimate institutional purpose for universities that are meant to endure for centuries, not just admission cycles.
This case against the practice is, at first glance, overwhelming. Critics rightly argue that by granting any preference to the children of alumni, elite universities risk transforming themselves from drivers of opportunity into self-perpetuating aristocracies. In this view, admissions is a zero-sum game: every seat reserved for a legacy applicant, who has likely already benefited from a lifetime of high-quality schooling and extracurricular enrichment, is a seat denied to a first-generation striver for whom a Stanford degree would be truly life-altering. To prioritize institutional continuity over individual merit feels, to many, like a betrayal of the University’s stated mission to serve as a catalyst for a more equitable society. If the goal is to break the cycle, then continuing to count ancestry as a credential is, at best, a paradox and, at worst, a moral failure.
That moral intuition is powerful. We must ask, however, whether legacy preference actually produces those harms at meaningful scale, and whether eliminating it would produce the gains critics assume or create drawbacks they do not.
Elite universities are not neutral sorting machines. They are long-lived institutions with financial obligations, research missions and intergenerational commitments. Admissions policy is one of the tools, imperfect and politically unpopular though it may be, that helps sustain that ecosystem.
Legacy admissions are not a guarantee of admission, nor do they replace academic thresholds. In practice, legacy status functions as a modest preference, often operating as a tie-breaker among applicants who are already competitive. That distinction is critical. The common narrative that legacy students displace significantly stronger candidates is emotionally compelling but empirically thin.
What gets lost in this debate is that elite universities are one of the few places in American life where different social worlds come together. Stanford’s value lies not only in its faculty or curriculum, but in students’ access to its network, the dense web of alumni, mentors, founders, investors and leaders. Students do not just earn a degree, they enter circles that shape careers, capital access and long-term opportunity. A student whose parents are teachers in the Central Valley may share a dorm or project team with the child of a venture capitalist or senator. That proximity has real effects.
Importantly, that network is not a resource that exists independently of the student body. It is partly composed of the families and circles critics see as privileged. Legacy students do not simply extract value from the institutional network; they are disproportionately among the people who constitute it. While the network is not accessed equally and legacy students still arrive with social capital advantages, once enrolled, the institutional network is far more shared than exclusive, and that shared infrastructure is part of what makes upward mobility through universities like Stanford possible.
Further, Stanford depends heavily on alumni engagement and philanthropic support to maintain its core commitments, including need-blind admissions and generous financial aid. Endowments do not appear spontaneously. They are built through decades of sustained giving. Alumni who feel a sense of continuity, who see the university not just as a past chapter but as a family institution, are more likely to give consistently and at scale.
This is not romanticism. It is an institutional reality. Research funding, financial aid expansion and capital projects are all downstream of donor loyalty. Legacy admissions are better understood as an attachment signal rather than a transaction: it’s a way in which institutions acknowledge long-term alumni investment. They are one mechanism among several that reinforce alumni loyalty, which in turn underwrites the university’s broader access mission. Removing that signal does not redirect elite capital toward equity but away from the institution altogether.
Universities do not operate in a vacuum. If Stanford unilaterally abandons a practice that peer institutions retain, it does not end inherited advantage. It cedes resources.
The most serious critique of legacy admissions is that they perpetuate inequality. That concern has merit, but it is misdirected. Legacy preferences operate at the margins of a system where inequality is already deeply embedded, in unequal K-12 schooling and differences in enrichment that shape who is prepared to compete at all. Changing that margin does not address where disadvantage actually originates nor expand access for students who are currently excluded from Stanford’s applicant pool.
It is worth noting that legacy admissions and affirmative action are often treated as diametrically opposed, as corrective justice and inherited privilege, respectively. I do not agree. For the same reason that limited legacy preference can be justified, affirmative action should be supported. Both reflect the reality that admissions decisions must inevitably incorporate social context, rather than operating as pure academic algorithms.
Ironically, the programs that do address inequality — financial aid outreach initiatives and bridge programs — are funded by the same alumni networks that legacy admissions help sustain. The moral clarity of abolishing legacy preferences may feel satisfying, but it risks weakening the very mechanisms that enable Stanford to broaden access in practice rather than rhetoric. Universities cannot pursue justice if they destroy the mechanisms that allow them to fund it.
Stanford already weighs non-academic factors such as athletic recruitment, geographic diversity, artistic talent and institutional needs. Faculty children receive consideration. The list goes on. Though these considerations are not identical — each serves different institutional goals — the relevant point is that admissions is unavoidably holistic. To single out legacy status as exceptionally immoral is to ignore the reality that class composition is shaped by institutional priorities, not test scores and GPAs. Legacy preference sits within the same architecture, tied to institutional continuity rather than individual achievement.
This is not an argument for unlimited or opaque legacy preference. Legacy admissions should be narrow, transparent and only for qualified candidates. That could mean public reporting of legacy admit rates, strict academic readiness thresholds and periodic review of how much weight the preference carries. Above all, no applicant should be admitted solely on the basis of familial affiliation.
Universities face real trade-offs. Stanford can aspire to fairness while acknowledging that institutions require continuity to function. Pretending otherwise is a luxury afforded by those who do not have to balance budgets, fund laboratories or guarantee financial aid.
Admissions as a whole deserves reform, but eliminating legacy preference will not fix what is broken. Legacy admissions is not nostalgia or entitlement, it creates institutional durability. The honest debate is not whether the policy feels unfair in isolation, but whether Stanford is willing to give up a tool that helps sustain the opportunities critics want expanded. Moral simplicity is attractive, institutional stewardship is harder. Only one keeps the lights on.
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