<p>That is not correct. Have a look at the Arcidiacono study:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2012/01/17/unpublished-study-draws-ire-minorities”>http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2012/01/17/unpublished-study-draws-ire-minorities</a></p>
<p>Here is what the study has to say about legacies:</p>
<p>"As a robustness check, we now consider a group where convergence would seem unlikely: legacies.</p>
<p>Legacies likely come into college more prepared due to their advantaged backgrounds. Hence, we would expect legacies to perform relatively worse than non-legacies in their senior year compared to their freshmen year.</p>
<p>Looking at raw grades, however, reveals evidence of legacies improving their position over time, with legacies starting out 0.17 points behind their white non-legacy counterparts and improving to 0.06 points behind by their last semester of the senior year. Table 5, however, shows this convergence is illusory by repeating the analysis of Tables 3-4 for legacies.</p>
<p>The first set of columns in Table 5 show that legacies gain over 5.5 percentage points relative to their white non-legacy counterparts, making up a third of the initial gap. However, just subtracting off the mean grade before calculating class rank shows instead that legacy position drops over time. Namely,median legacy position relative to their non-legacy counterpart drops by 2.1% from their freshmen year to their senior year. Note that this occurs both because legacies are taking more harshly graded courses as freshmen and because they are taking more leniently graded courses as seniors.</p>
<p>The last set of columns adjust for selection into courses. Selection into courses has no effect on legacy rank as seniors relative to the second set of columns. However, controlling for course selection as freshmen raises legacy rank. The net effect is then a widening of the gap between white non-legacies and legacies over time. While the unadjusted class rank showed the median legacy improving their position relative to the median white non-legacy by 5.5 percentage points, adjusting for selection shows their position actually falls by 3.8 percentage points. The convergence pattern between legacies and white non-legacies are then similar to African Americans, though the legacy estimates are less stable."</p>
<p>I have never seen any study that shows a preferred admission category performs as well as the regular admits. </p>