Banning legacy admissions is a coordination problem. Try to eliminate it at one school and parents (re: donors) will raise an uproar. It would need to be elimin

Banning legacy admissions is a coordination problem. Try to eliminate it at one school and parents (re: donors) will raise an uproar. It would need to be eliminated at the whole cohort of peer schools to eliminate parents’ exit option. Semi-related anecdote: my alma mater got huge pushback from donors when it tried to eliminate its football team [0], which was legendarily bad and a recruiting nightmare to boot (apparently football rosters can be 100+, though Swarthmore’s was ~53). So there was about as clear a case for elimination as you could hope for, and still it was a big controversy that impacted the school where administrators tend to notice — its endowment. So when we talk about eliminating legacy admissions, I picture that, but just a thousand times worse. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/05/sports/football-no-more-football-lots-of-questions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/05/sports/football-no-more-f...