<p>Are children of alumni heavily favored for admission at Wesleyan?</p>
<p>I can't give you any hard figures; but, there is almost certainly an advantage to being related to an alumnus. Something like 5% of the student body is composed of children of alumni.</p>
<p>This happens for several reasons, similar to at other colleges:
1) increases yield, since children of alumni are often more likely (due to very positive encouragement from parents) to actually wind up choosing the school
2) increases alumni gift-giving... upsetting the alumni -> less donations -> less money to spend building fun new things like the brand new campus center opening in Fall '07.</p>
<p>Yes, they're quite favored, and once in, they're quite pampered. My friend is 4th-generation Wesleyan whose grandfather was on the Board of Trustees. He gets a lot of personal e-mails from the dean and occasionally the President's wife, Midge Bennett, asking him how he's doing and how his grandfather is.</p>
<p>Maybe 4th-generation legacies whose grandfathers were on the Board of Trustees (damn!) get "pampered", but one of my parents went to Wes and I haven't gotten any notes from Midge. So your average alumni kid, once in, gets treated the same as anyone else... I WISH we got special treatment. </p>
<p>And for what it's worth, alumni kids get a lot MORE of a boost admissions-wise at other schools, notably Dartmouth and some others.</p>