[banana_feather]

They actually investigate this starting on p. 115 and find no significant short-term decrease based on observations from institutions that ceased consideration of legacy status.

I think the more important point this comment misses is that the family's wealth isn't going anywhere and their kids will still go to college, so it stands to reason that the alumni will still give, they'll just be giving to e.g. Arizona State instead of Harvard, which seems like a net positive to me. If people are being honest about their concern that donations from wealthy alumni are good because they subsidize education, those fears are totally allayed.

[lazyasciiart]

"Moreover, any loss in alumni giving at the elite institutions would presumably be at least partially, if not fully, offset by additional giving to alternative institutions where parents of wealthy students might donate as an alternative, and the wealthy students themselves would become alumni. "

I think that paper over-indexes on exactly that argument - that having a relative attend the school is just a proxy for wealth, so they would give just as much anyway if they went to a different school. It doesn't stand to reason at all that the donations will be transferred to whatever other school their kid attends, donations like this are not fungible and do not scale linearly - if everyone in your family for five generations has gone to Harvard, and your kid goes to Arizona State, you aren't suddenly going to build a family tradition of loving Arizona State. You're more likely to simply dilute the strength of the family-college connection and not donate at all, or donate a perfunctory amount and put the rest into the opera you attend these days. I didn't look up the authors of this study, but they certainly didn't bother to mention any familiarity with the field of fundraising, which isn't as straightforward as they make it sound. Even if the strength of connection was the same, do public schools have the same skills and desire to request donations as Harvard does?

To test that hypothesis: they should check the Arizona State alumni to see if the number of relatives who attended Harvard is just as good a predictor of donations to Arizona State, because it's equally as strong a proxy for wealth when you attend Arizona State as when you attend Harvard. My bet is that it's a very weak predictor!