The conservative advocate who dismantled affirmative action is joining forces with a center-left Democrat and a Duke University economist to challenge another sacred cow in elite college admissions: preferential treatment for the offspring of alumni.
“Legacy applicants have done nothing meritorious to earn this advantage,” wrote Edward Blum, education analyst Richard Kahlenberg and economist Peter Arcidiacono, a political independent, to the Education Department recently, urging officials to track legacy in admissions and analyze the impact. Blum, a conservative, spearheaded the lawsuit against Harvard College that helped lead the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action in 2023, while the other two men testified against the practice.
Their efforts add to an accelerating bipartisan push to ban legacy preferences in admissions as America focuses more on who gets into college and why. The scrutiny on a hereditary leg up has intensified since the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, which ended most race-based admission preferences and prompted new questions about other nonmerit-based special treatment.
Now, the debate around legacy preferences—and in some cases, advantages for children of donors—is heating up further given that President Trump has placed meritocratic admissions at the center of his higher-education agenda.
