I went to an Ivy League school in the late '70s. At the time, I think legacy admission rates were over 40% and in some cases higher. In the 2010s I am legitimately shocked if one of my college classmates reports a child who goes to alma mater. If you correct for the fact that many legacy kids probably enjoy the advantages of affluence, social capital and strong educations, I wonder if legacy preferences mean much at all at this point.
As I think about this I am excluding the children of alums who give millions of dollars to a school because, as we’ve seen, those kinds of donations move the admissions needle whether you are a legacy or not.
It can provide a small bump at some schools, but there are caveats and it certainly is no guaranty of acceptance. For example my college is clear that legacy only counts for applicants who apply ED.
I’m in the same boat as you in that my alma mater’s acceptance rate has declined to a ridiculous level – even though my kids had higher standardized tests etc. than I did they were not realistic candidates for the college and did not apply. That said, it worked out for the best as each kid found a school that was a great fit and had a wonderful four years.
My understanding is that, at most top schools, legacy will tip the needle only if your child’s profile is typical of other applicants’ filling the niche into which the applicant fits. If all else is equal/identical, legacy can help. It will not do anything for a candidate with weak credentials (exception: child of major donor).
Yes, as my high school junior enters the next admissions cycle, I wonder about this. I don’t think his dad or I would have been able to get into our alma maters (both top ranked small liberal arts colleges) nowadays. His stats are better than either of ours, and very typical for both those schools. But the colleges are much harder to get into now. No idea how he will fare. It is scary when the admissions rates get lower each year and early decision and waitlist fill higher percentages of each class. It would be nice to think legacy might provide the tiniest of bumps to a candidate who would stand a good chance of admission even without legacy-- but who knows?
I’m not so sure that it even gets to the “if all else is equal/identical, then legacy can help” stage any more. Our son has the following legacy connections at a top Ivy League school: both parents, aunt, uncle, both grandfathers, and two great-grandfathers. All of those are loyal alumni, at least in regularity of attending school events and alumni contributions (though admittedly not in sizeable amounts). His academic credentials are more than sufficient to qualify him for admission to said school, as evidenced by the fact that he was accepted at several other highly ranked schools, including another Ivy. No connections at any of those schools, but got in there and didn’t get into the one school where he had an overwhelming set of connections. Go figure.
@Dolemite If you read the article and not the headline, the advantage isn’t much at all, especially when you correct for the fact that legacy applicants are already ahead of the average because of the advantages they’ve had in life and that some subset of legacy applicants do have families writing 7-figure checks to the university.
@TheGreyKing I wonder too about my junior. I’m thinking about dissuading him from applying to my alma mater, because, as @happy1 says, to the extent legacy status helps at all, it’s been made clear that it only helps if you apply early and I’m not sure his ED “bullet” is best-used at a place where his chances are so low.
“I went to an Ivy League school in the late '70s. At the time, I think legacy admission rates were over 40% and in some cases higher.”
It depends on how you look at it. But you have to realize that the low odds elite admissions environment today is 1000% apples to the oranges of the olden days. In context, I’d argue that the legacy preference today is stronger than it was in the olden days. A few data points.
1970 Penn acceptance rate was 70%; 1997 was 33%; 2016 was 9.4%. 1976 Yale admit rate was 26.4%; 1997 was 20%; 2016 was 6.8%. These days, the HYP legacy admit rate is usually reported as being 3-4X the overall admit rate.
If you want to, you can call that a “feather on the scale” since you still have 75-80% of legacies being rejected and the legacies getting in have very high stats. Or you can call that big since (even after adjusting for the favorable demographics of a pool of Ivy League children) your chances are way way better as a legacy.
As a matter of math, the correct answer is that the legacy preference statistically is HUGE today. Despite being HUGE, most legacy kids are going to be rejected. Which is why the anectdotal stories seem so inconsistent with the actual data, but they actually are quite consistent.
Folks will often talk about the legacy preference as being “just” a tie-breaker; no big deal. Reality is that to day’s elite admissions pool is so strong that there are gobs of applicant kids who are extremely highly qualified. So if you are playing a game that most often results in a tie, possessing a tie-breaker (legacy, athlete, URM) is essential.
The cited Hurwitz study (while not perfect) is the best analysis you will ever get on this. Since he was actually permitted to read thousands and thousands and thousands of actual application files from the COFHE member schools. So he was able to see exactly what happened when H legacy applied to Harvard and then took his exact same credentials to Yale and to Princeton.
His conclusion – legacy is a lot bigger than you think. But the schools have every incentive to minimize the strength of the preference. Which is easy to do since tripling or quadrupling a specific kid’s chances still means that one specific kid probably still gets rejected.
@Dolemite I suppose that fits with what @northwesty is saying. If it’s a 45% advantage but the school has a single-digit acceptance rate, it helps but it probably doesn’t feel like it helps very much, which explains my intuitive (not mathematical) reaction.
Also, the strength of the preference does vary from school to school and is also masked or correlated with ED practices. Legacy makes more difference at Penn and Duke (which are HUGE ED schools) than it does at Harvard (which is SCEA not ED).
From personal experience with my own kids, and anecdotally from friends and friends of friends, I know that legacy can and does make a big difference in getting accepted into elite national universities and liberal arts colleges. But the legacy needs to apply Early Action or Early Decision if it is offered, in order for the legacy status to make a difference in the admissons decision. Also, the students have to have a strong competitive application.
From my experience, at the highest level, it is an extremely important tiebreaker.
I personally know a child of a Stanford alum who got into Stanford but not UChicago or Harvard. And a child of a UChicago alum who got into UChicago but not Stanford or Harvard. And a child of a Harvard alum who got into Harvard, but not Stanford, or UChicago. I know more examples, but those three were the most obvious. All of them were qualified to go to these schools, but that final feather on the scale as to WHICH school let them in seems to have been their legacy status.
I think at the elite schools being a legacy it is the third best hook, behind only 1) having a parent with ridiculously wealth or fame, or 2) being a recruited athlete.
I think it was more important in the past, when competition was not so stiff, Back then, a less qualified legacy would be admitted. Now, when they get thousands and thousands of applications from extremely qualified candidates, it just serves as a tiebreaker among otherwise fully qualified kids.
I suspect if you did a numerical analysis that Legacy is significantly more important at Notre Dame than at Georgetown, more important at SMU than at Baylor or Rice, more important at Smith, Bryn Mawr and Mt Holyoke than at Wellesley, and more important at Duke than at U Chicago or JHU even though you will see a lot of crossover in terms of admits and applications.
In my last few years of interviewing for Brown, all of my “legacy” candidates were “soft turndowns” (i.e. waitlisted, in years when Brown was taking a dozen or so kids off the wait lists… so a waitlist was indeed a “thanks for applying”). Some ended up at Dartmouth, Penn, U Chicago, and similar… so it’s not as though they were uncompetitive admits. But absent some substantial hook- artistic, literary, scientific accomplishment, etc. just being a legacy didn’t appear to be much of a factor.
Don’t know if I agree that legacy is of less benefit at Harvard. Some anecdotal evidence here. At the New York Harvard Club reception for EA admits to the class of 2019 the overwhelming majority of students were legacies. Over all, seven of ten admits from my son’s school (highly selective NYC public) were legacies. Not that they had poor scores. Average SAT’s for the seven legacies was probably 2300. For the non-legacies 2390 was closer to the mark. Based on experience at my son’s school, legacy definitely is a benefit for otherwise extremely well qualified candidates.
This is total speculation, but I would imagine that legacy status matters a lot at schools that are trying to improve their yield rates… if your parents went to the school, it’s a sign you’re more likely to attend if accepted, thus it’s sort of a safe bet for the school.
“And I don’t think you can generalize. I suspect if you did a numerical analysis that Legacy is significantly more important at Notre Dame than at Georgetown.”
As noted above, schools obviously vary on this.
Notre Dame is probably the single biggest legacy school there is, which fits in with their brand as a family (or some would say cult). 24% of the class or so. Gtown is about 8%.
Penn is a big legacy school too, since they define legacy broadly – parent or grandparent with any type of Penn degree. In contrast, Harvard only counts parents with an undergrad degree.
But even at Harvard, 16% of the class are legacies and the legacy admit rate is 3X the overall rate. Very hard to explain all of that away.
Legacy admissions (just like its close cousin early decision) definitely improves yield. Also reduces the financial aid needed to enroll students. The primary financial reason why schools use legacy (and ED) is to get enrolled students who will tend towards tuition full pay. That has much more $$$ impact than the oft-cited rationale of donations.
The colleges that do use legacy preference want the legacies to think that the preference is large, but want others to think that the preference is small.
I suppose what I’d ultimately say is that while being a legacy can count as a ‘hook’, in no way is it as powerful a hook as being either a recruited athlete or a URM. The pool of qualified legacy applicants for any school is huge, the pool of qualified athletes good enough to be recruited or qualified URMs is a heck of a lot smaller, so often times schools are competing for those kids. By definition, schools aren’t competing for the legacy applicants, so I think it can be more of a take it or leave factor.
@ucbalumnus is right. I’d add that at the tippy-top schools. the legacy population tends to hover in the 10-15% range, which is big enough to ensure that legacies are seen to have a real chance but small enough to leave plenty of room for everyone else the university wants and to ensure that the university doesn’t look like a finishing school.
There was a good thread a few months ago on the topic of “how wealthy families manipulate admissions at elite universities”. Below are some quotes from it that I think summarize the real value of legacy preference. Note that the well-known Hurwitz study, which showed that legacy status conferred substantial advantages, was being discussed. I think that study was incomplete, for reasons that will be clear.
In this first quote, it’s argued that legacies are admitted in greater numbers to their legacy schools than other comparable schools, but noted that that may be in part because their families are involved and generous to their legacy schools (and usually not to any other school), and the applicants are probably high-SES and therefore likely to produce strong applications: