Haven’t posted in YEARS but will occasionally lurk from time to time. In any event, felt compelled to chime in here.
Advantage for legacy applicants in the admissions process is going absolutely nowhere and money is the reason. Penn and other elite private institutions have been playgrounds for the wealthy and well-connected since their beginning, which is why they are “elite” at all. An ongoing relationship with wealthy alumni and those with social clout helps the school brand and influence while providing it with material resources. What will happen, however, is that legacy advantage will increasingly only be conferred to applicants who apply early and whose parents donate higher and higher amounts of money, since the alumni base has only grown and diversified with time. As a recent alumni, I fully anticipate that my children will receive no leg up from my attending Penn simply because I will in all likelihood not have donated enough to the university in sum (though I do stay involved with the university in different ways).
That said, other hooks won’t disappear either: first-gen status, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, state of residency (for under-represented states), athletics, etc. The biggest issue at Penn and schools like it is that the first two hooks in the list immediate before this aren’t leveraged nearly enough (certainly not comparable to the amount of time schools spend touting them), nor are all the necessary support mechanisms in place to actually support these students and their success once the arrive on campus (and it’s only becomes more complicated when you also must account for race, ethnicity or religious affiliation) given they may likely be starting from behind in comparison to their classmates despite their intelligence or work ethic. Resources matter, and they matter from the first moment children enter a classroom in their lives. American universities, no matter how elite, can’t necessarily fix that, but they can do more in than they are doing when it comes to fostering development and success for everyone who sets foot on their campus.