In the firestorm after the United States Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action in college admissions, highly selective universities have been reconsidering many aspects of the application process – notably, legacy admissions.

“Legacy” applicants are students who have a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or sibling that is an alumna(e) of the school to which they are applying. Many universities have considered legacy status in their application process because it creates a multi-generational community and helps encourage alumni donations, which schools say is used for scholarships for less-fortunate students.

However, with cases such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University making their way through the courts, where legacy considerations are being challenged as “affirmative action for the wealthy,” the idea of the “legacy” may be at the end of its useful life.

Highly selective schools such as Amherst College, Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Wesleyan University have announced that they will no longer be considering a student’s status as a legacy in the upcoming applications season.

For universities such as Harvard, where 36% of the class of 2022 were legacies, it may be a little more complicated. Over the past several years, its legacy admit rate has been quietly decreasing: 14.6% of the class of 2023, and 12% for the class of 2024. At Yale, those numbers hover around 10-15%: 8% for the class of 2024, 14% for the class of 2025, and 12% for the class of 2026.

Ivy League admissions officers are no dummies. They can tell which direction the wind is blowing, and they don’t like bad publicity. However, these are universities that are deeply steeped in tradition. Those that hold such ties a little more loosely – such as Amherst and Johns Hopkins – are freer to make major changes.

It is a situation that all of us are watching closely.