<p>You can look up what % of Harvard legacies are accepted. That alone shows that they are not uniformly accepted and that there is no auto admit process there.</p>
<p>Schools have different ways of looking at legacies and giving them advantages in admissions. My alma mater along with some other schools will only give a boost (don’t know how much and they won’t say) if the student applies ED. UPenn does the same. Some schools have all of the alumni kids put in a pool and they are assessed and picked as a group. Some do have a nearly auto admit policy. </p>
<p>But kids who are legacies usually have some advantage, but even among legacies, not all advantages are equal. Someone who is a development alum is going to have a whole lot more clout for his/her kids getting accepted than someone who writes his $100 check to the school once in a while. In fact if the development numbers and contacts are strong enough, they’ll trump legacy most all of the time. </p>
<p>One thing I have noticed is that those kids accepted to Harvard and like select schools and who have the legacy hook, are also highly qualified applicants. Yes, they were picked over many other highly qualified applicants, but it is not the case that they were not kids that “Harvard material”. The same with those with URM status. The only real quarter I have seen given up on admissions standards by these schools has been for mainstream athletics and for truly disadvantaged kids who have worked there way up despite some terrible odds. That’s not to say that a bunch of development admits are not slipped in or that others don’t have a story about this kid or another, but this is just what I have seen in the last 15 years of college admissions in an area and at schools where highly selective colleges are so often sought.</p>