“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.