Admissions Priorities and Campus Diversity: Insights from the Common Data Set

Selective college admissions shape access to opportunity in U.S. higher education, yet researchers have limited systematic evidence on how institutions' publicly stated admissions priorities relate to who enrolls. We ask whether colleges and universities that report considering alumni familial relation—"legacy status"—enroll smaller shares of underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (URM) first-year students. We compile a new panel of Common Data Set (CDS) reports from highly selective U.S. institutions spanning the 2010–2022 admissions cycles and collapse it to institution-level measures. After adjusting for sector and for the broader bundle of reported admissions priorities, institutions that report considering legacy status enroll roughly 7–8 percentage points fewer URM students. The pattern persists under alternative control constructions, functional forms, and influence checks. Legacy ratings change rarely within institutions over this period, so the association is driven primarily by stable differences across institutions. In our elite sample, the binary legacy contrast is identified among public institutions. Treating CDS admissions priorities as standardized organizational signals, our CDS-based approach provides a replicable framework for tracking how institutions' stated priorities align with enrollment composition—an issue likely to draw heightened attention in the post–Students for Fair Admissions environment.