Preference for “legacies” in admissions is decreasing, according to Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel.

At a panel discussion at New York University last week, Brenzel discussed legacy admissions at Yale with Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and Daniel Golden, an editor at large at Bloomberg, the New York Times reported.

“We turn away 80 percent of our legacies, and we feel it every day,” Brenzel said while on the panel. He added that this year, Yale rejected more children of the University’s Sterling donors — a classification for some of Yale’s most generous contributors — than it accepted.

Contrary to Brenzel’s statement, Kahlenberg and Golden argued that many elite colleges offer substantial advantages to legacy applicants. Kahlenberg said one study has found that being the son or daughter of an undergraduate alum increases a student’s chance of being admitted by 41.5 percent.

Brenzel disputed Kahlenberg’s data, and said legacies only make up 10 percent of the 2010-11 undergraduate class, while they accounted for 31.4 percent in 1939.