Amherst to stop offering legacy preference in admissions

Merit certainly exists, but people do not agree how it should be defined or measured. An extreme example would be a politician who has fanatical supporters (who see the politician with high merit) and fanatical opponents (who see the politician with negative merit). In other words, it is often a subjectively defined opinion as to what it is in any given context.

On the more mundane topic of college admissions, this thread is basically about the question “should legacy status be part of merit for the college’s purposes as it makes admission decisions?”. You can also construct similar questions replacing “legacy status” with other attributes that applicant has (“development relation”, “recruited athlete status”, “URM status”, “SAT/ACT scores”, etc.). Basically, any college with more applicants than it has space for (accounting for expected yield) must decide which of them have enough merit (as the college defines “merit”) to be admitted.

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However merit is defined, objectively or subjectively or both, no one thinks legacy preference in college admissions is based on merit. Am I wrong?

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Some colleges may think that the “merit” of legacies is that of (a) the donation flow, and (b) maintaining connection to dynastic VIPs in business, politics, etc… This does not mean that such “merit” is earned by the applicants / students themselves, as opposed to being “inherited”.

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To me, merit is something associated with an individual or a group of individuals. Whether the legacy admission policy has “merit” from a college’s perspective is something entirely different.

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Legacy applicants / students would be a group of individuals identified by the college has having some desirable characteristic.

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Then development admits have even more “merit”.

From the viewpoint of the colleges that consider that, yes.

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Some of us would think that’s the opposite of merit (maybe even a form of corruption). It all depends on perspectives, I guess.

As I wrote above, the definition and measure of merit is not something that all people will agree on. One person may see merit where another person may see corruption.

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On the topic of development admits, here’s an old, but still relevant, article from WSJ about the practice:
https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/Polk_Rich_Applicants.htm

The boost that a student gets from legacy admission pales in comparison to the boost they get for attending private high schools. I read an article recently about this and if I have time later I’ll post it to the thread. The numbers I remember were something like around 7% of high schoolers attend private high schools in the US but account for over a third of selective private university undergraduates. @MaximoGomez your kids go to a private high school and I expect they will do well with admissions. I personally think that these rich private universities that amass money left and right should not benefit from non-profit status, let’s say above a certain endowment. As a tax payer that is one area that I’d like to see addressed.

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40% of the graduates at my kids high school matriculate at schools with an <20% acceptance rate.

There you go. That’s a super high percentage.

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Part of the apparent “boost” kids get for attending private schools is explained by the fact that many of the private school admits are also legacies.

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Around 8.8% of US high school students attended private schools in 2017, according to Private elementary and secondary school enrollment and private enrollment as a percentage of total enrollment in public and private schools, by region and grade level: Selected years, fall 1995 through fall 2017 .

However, also remember that it is a subset of private schools that are focused on academics and pipelines to highly selective colleges. About 76.4% of private high school students attend religious schools, according to Enrollment and percentage distribution of students enrolled in private elementary and secondary schools, by school orientation and grade level: Selected years, fall 1995 through fall 2017 . Although some religious schools are academically elite, many are not.

Of course, the academically elite private schools are also typically selective admission. Whether the better college outcomes are due to selection effect or treatment effect or both is not always obvious.

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So what you’re saying is that if you remove the religious (not so selective) high schools from the calculations the “boost” would be even stronger.

The numbers are the numbers and you can spin them any way you like. The highly rejective colleges are masters at this.

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Nothing wrong with that.

Yes, the apparent boost would be greater (also, some non-religious schools may also be focused on something other than academics). However, as noted above, it is not necessarily obvious how much is selection effect (i.e. students who are stronger academically or are legacies, etc.) or treatment effect (the school actually helps the students get into more selective colleges) or both.

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I get your point. Correlation does not imply causation. That doesn’t stop all of us here on CC from claiming all sorts of causation in the holistic admissions process to highly rejective universities. I’m just pointing out that the correlation between attending private high schools is stronger than being a legacy candidate for admissions. The effect might indeed be additive, in which case double kudos to @MaximoGomez’s kids if they decide to attend their parent’s alma matter.

And another part is that they can select among the most talented public school kids. A small number of our talented local middle school kids end up at an elite high school. None were legacy, but all ended up in elite colleges as well.

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