Amherst to stop offering legacy preference in admissions

I agree, which is part of why I don’t understand @1NJParent’s HMC explanation.

And sure there are “Hail Mary” attempts, but those have a very small probability of success. For the most part, I don’t think that top schools are admitting largely unqualified legacies or even legacies who are a terrible fit. For the most part, these schools are admitting qualified legacies who are a good fit. Or rather, they are admitting a larger subset of qualified legacies who are a good fit, as compared to comparably qualified non-legacies who are a good fit. Therein lies the unfairness.

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On a relative basis, a smaller proportion of HMC alumni, because of HMC’s core curriculum, would think their children are suitable for their alma mater than, say Brown alumni.

I’m also not sure what hypothesis on Stanford you’re referring to. That Stanford offers less of a legacy boost than Harvard?

Not about HMC but just wanted to add, there is a big difference between being academically qualified and being a realistically competitive applicant. The later usually has that something else factor in the form of superior ECs/ accomplishments, energy, interests or background in addition to having fantastic stats. If you stripped away their legacy advantage how many of these legacy applicants would appear to have brought a knife to a gun fight?

Not sure I agree, but assuming this is true, there will still be plenty of legacy applications to the top schools. And whether the school is “techie” or not some of these legacies will have comparable qualifications to others who are on the bubble, so to speak. So I don’t understand how this supports your “techie” school theory with regard to legacies.

To paraphrase, you suggested that Stanford admitted about half the legacies as Harvard because Stanford was more “techie” and thus could easier distinguish between qualified and unqualified applicants. Turns out that Stanford admits 16.2% legacies, which is in-line with Harvard other top schools. Stanford’s percentage is lower because Stanford gets more legacy applicants (for multiple reasons, including how Stanford defines legacy), and Stanford apparently doesn’t want their classes to consist of 48% legacies. This likely has more to do with their values as an institution than their techie-ness.

Of the ones admitted to top schools? My guess is less than one might think.

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Because of their familiarity with HMC’s core curriculum, there’re fewer (percentage-wise) unqualified/underqualified legacy applicants among its “techier” pool than there are at schools with “fuzzier” pools. This self-selection makes legacy boost much less necessary at a school like HMC, and legacy preference wouldn’t be viewed by its alums to be that much of a benefit.

Sounds like you haven’t read my follow-up post. I stand corrected about the relative percentages of legacies admitted at the two schools. However, the point that Stanford offers less of a legacy boost than Harvrd still stands. As I pointed out in that post, Harvard admits legacies at twice the rate as Stanford, even with Stanford’s broader interpretation of what a legacy is.

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Regarding the football analogy the “Hail Mary” applicants generally don’t get in either way. As for the rest, I think you underestimate the qualifications of the legacy applicant pool at top universities, whether or not they are techies. And the “legacy boost” isn’t “necessary” at any of these top schools, except to keep alums happy the money flowing.

I have. Your original theory was that Stanford provides less of a boost because its applicants are more “techie” and thus their qualifications were more easily differentiated. So the question is why does Stanford admit 16.2% legacies? Is it because Stanford is more techie? You’ve still provided nothing suggesting that this is the case. It seems much more likely that Stanford just gets a lot more legacy applicants, but doesn’t want to devote an even larger percentage of its class to legacies than an already high 16.2%.

But the broader definition means more legacy applicants, thus pushing the legacy acceptance rate down. Nothing to do with the “techie-ness” of Stanford.

If the reason that Harvard’s legacy admit rates is twice as high as Stanford’s is because Stanford has twice as many legacies as you suggest, wouldn’t their comparable proportions of legacies mean that Stanford give its legacies less of a boost? Because most legacy applicants tend to apply early, the difference between REA/SCEA and RD admit rates at the two schools also seems to suggest that Stanford offers its legacies a smaller boost.

I’m also fairly confident that the proportion of legacies at “techier” schools like HMC is much lower with or without legacy preferences.

You seem to be trying to find disagreement where none exists. I haven’t disagreed with your claim that Harvard’s legacy applicant admit rate is twice as high. Rather I only disagreed with your mistaken claim that there is twice the proportion of legacy students at Harvard than Stanford. And if instead you want to call the legacy applicant admission rate the legacy bump, that’s fine. I’ve been focused on the why, and it seems pretty obvious that none of this has much to do with Stanford’s techie-ness or Harvard’s “fuzziness.”

Stanford doesn’t seem to fit with your theory. If anything, Stanford’s high number of legacy applications (and lower percentage of legacy admits) cuts against your theory that techie school alums will be more in in tune with whether there child is a good candidate and self-select away from applying when their kid isn’t qualified.

Anyway, I don’t think this discussion is going anywhere, so I’ll just say that I am not convinced that a “techie”-“fuzzy” continuum explains much about legacy admissions, and leave it at that.

I’d guess very few. They know they’re coming to a gunfight and they’re prepared. If a school has an admit rate of 5%, the real issue is that they probably have at least 10 perfect applicants for every one they admit. So the legacy may become the decider between otherwise equal applicants. Admits are typically equal to, not better than, a part of the pool that is denied or WL.

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It isn’t a theory. It takes far more for something to become a theory. It’s just a hypothesis based on observed differences of legacy admissions at various colleges:

  • “Techier” schools, especially ones with more rigorous core curricula, have fewer legacies (or fewer legacies among their “techier” students) and lower average legacy admit rate bumps (due to their larger proportion of “techie” legacy applicants), with or without them giving legacies an explicit admission boost.

I don’t expect to prove the hypothesis and you can certainly disagree with it.

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Not saying you are right or wrong but I have noticed over the years on the chance me threads many legacy applicants with strong stats but relatively ordinary sounding ECs and profiles. Knowing you have to be prepared and being able to get there are two different things. Maybe the plan was to have them be a recruited athlete or a stand out in another activity and the kid doesn’t progress or succeed as expected. Maybe one of the kid’s feature ECs has become overused and is now a dime a dozen like starting a non profit or building houses in Haiti on a student tour. If they have the high academic stats on paper I think the easy thing to do is to put in an app anyway. I wouldn’t call this a hail mary application since they have the threshold stats. They are just not as competitive in the other parts of their application. Not convinced all these kids self select out and not convinced some of these kids don’t make it through admissions. The real test if they would be admitted to a peer school without the legacy advantage.

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Like my friend’s D who was rejected from Cornell as a multigen legacy but accepted to Yale with no hooks.

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Exactly. My classmates kids- rejected from Brown- attending Penn, Yale, Cornell, JHU with no legacy. So not exactly slouches in the academic department.

Just proves that if Brown doesn’t need a trombone that year but Yale does… or if Brown has already met its need for “poets who love astronomy” but Cornell hasn’t…Legacy is not going to overcome other institutional priorities, all things being equal. For the typical legacy whose parents have not endowed the medical school (frankly, most of the legacy kids come from affluent but not mega affluent families) getting “a second read” is NOT the same thing as getting in!!! But I’ve heard it’s a very nice rejection letter, aka “We wish we had room for you”.

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I suppose absent legacy status you could put all the equivalent applicants (having already picked out your oboist, poet etc) in a hat and select one that way. Regardless of the admissions process there will always be some kids with outstanding qualifications who are rejected. There is no magic formula (if you aren’t a recruited athlete, a truly exceptional mind or a development case) that will guarantee admission. Personally, I think the emphasis on ever more esoteric ECs is crazy and meaningless - it doesn’t demonstrate much more than a kid’s willingness to devote their teenage years to the pursuit of elite college admissions. As a result there is something of a sameness to the kids who are admitted to many of these schools (excepting some of the “techie” ones) which probably leads to a dearth of truly original and creative thinking.

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Legacy is more often the cherry on top of a privilege sundae. These kids go to expensive prep schools where the median GPA is 3.5 or higher, there are a wide variety of ECs to pad an application with, and the AO’s at top colleges have regular talks with the guidance counselors to discuss how many kids from the prep school will attend the university. Legacy is one of many advantages these kids have.

The more tech-oriented top universities shed some of these bad admissions practices earlier because their ultimate customers, employers, don’t need entitled trust fund kids, they need problem solvers with advanced STEM skills. The better state schools went hard after STEM 20 years ago to attract employers to their states, and now a lot of the privates are playing catch up.

Academics feels like an entire industry teetering on the edge of a cliff, and I think university education will look very different 20 years from now than it does today. So one school going TO or another ending legacy preference is really just moving deck chairs around the Titanic. The university system needs a fundamental overhaul of how it delivers its services, and I believe the market will force that change on an industry that measures change in decades, not years.

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The ultimate customers are employers? Unless you are talking about actual technical colleges- no. A tech university has a multi faceted mission (you don’t think those researchers laboring away for 30 years who end up winning a Nobel prize gives a rats $%% about employers, do you?) and the pipeline to a “good job” is pretty low on the totem pole. These universities (I assume you are talking about Cal Tech, MIT, etc.) end up “supplying” industry almost by default and it certainly is not top of mind on any Adcom. “Oh, look at Johnny. Google is going to snap him up in four years!”

20 years ago we were reading that university education was an entire industry teetering on the edge of a cliff, the internet and distance learning was going to bust apart the model of kids paying big bucks to live on a campus for four years when they could take courses from their bedroom on a laptop.

Meanwhile- the fall-off rates on distance learning (the number of students who complete a course, as a percentage of those who start) have barely budged in the last 10 years. Distance learning is hard. It is modestly easier for students at the more capable end of the tail and significantly harder for students at the less capable end of the tail. That’s one reason why the successful online learner organizations (SNHU for example) aren’t trying to be U Chicago. They are trying to offer vocational type college courses to adult learners who never finished college the first time around.

But SNHU isn’t about to dethrone the traditional university system- not in the US, not in Europe-- anytime soon, despite the predictions. Do you want your chemo prescribed by an oncologist who took organic chemistry online? Do you want to fly in an airplane designed by a team which learned their trade/craft any way other than the traditional gronking in a lab, getting the wrong answers, until they came up with the right answer???

I can’t wait to see the next 20 years, but my prediction is that universities will be more similar to the way they function now than different. If Covid didn’t bust apart that model, nothing will (at least in the next few decades).

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I think that any industry is due for a change if it is riddled with privilege (by design), sets unrealistic expectations for its graduates, frequently doesn’t teach its customers marketable skills, and leaves many of them saddled with life altering debt.

According to US News, private school tuition has increased 144% since 2002. Projecting that same rate into the future, an $80,000 a year education in 2021 will cost $195,200 per year by 2041. Seems unlikely that is sustainable, but who knows?

There are a lot of industries (retail, media, capital markets) that were convinced that what they did was so important and valuable that it would never be impacted by technology. How many of us trade stocks over the phone?

The way people learn is just beginning to change after decades of young people learning in fundamentally the same manner, sitting in a room, listening to a teacher or professor. I think we are at the beginning of a revolution in education, but maybe education is the one industry that is impervious to tech. We will see.

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That’s a reference to sticker price before FA at USNWR national universities, without adjusting for inflation. If you consider average price instead of sticker and consider inflation, then the results can look very different. An example calculation I did for Stanford is re-quoted below. Stanford’s sticker price for wealthy kids has been increasing, but the FA price for lower+middle income kids has been decreasing (after adjusting for inflation). Rather than an overall increase in price, Stanford (and many other colleges) has gradually shifted the tuition burden from lower/middle income kids to wealthy kids.

Average Net Cost at Stanford Over Time (2013 $)
1999 – $31,700
2000 – $30,400
2001 – $32,800
2002 – $33,100
2003 – $30,600
2004 – $31,400
2005 – $32,700
2006 – $32,600
2007 – $33,100
2008 – $31,900
2009 – $29,300 (large increase in financial aid this year, likely due to new FA policy + subprime mortgage crisis)
2010 – $29,200 (still abnormally low average cost)
2011 – $29,700 (still abnormally low average cost)
2012 – $30,400
2013 – $31,700 (finally recovering from 2009 FA increase and returning to normal level)

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So why is the sticker price increasing then?

I don’t disagree that it’s due for a change- just that we’ve been hearing that higher ed is on its last legs for more than 20 years- and yet…

Data10 has the relevant numbers- what folks are actually paying, vs. sticker price.

And the real villains in the business- charging unsustainable prices, teaching no marketable skills- are the for-profit colleges. They prey on Pell grant recipients who don’t know that you do NOT need a BA in “court reporting” to get a job as a court reporter, or prey on middle class kids whose parents take out a HELOC so their kid can major in Sports management and end up selling memberships at Planet Fitness (you do not need a BA or even an AA for those jobs).

I am still astonished by the number of people I know in real life who don’t bother to find out if the college their kid insists is “the one” is a for-profit or not-for-profit. Does it matter? Well, why pay 40K a year for a marginal BS in " computing and programming" from a for-profit institution when a 15 week coding academy will give the kid better and more up to date skills? Yes it matters.

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