Does anyone else wonder why legacy admissions still exist at all? America is a much better place than it was when the practice of legacy admissions started…we have righted many wrongs since then but this one stubbornly persists. Gaining an advantage (any advantage!) because of where you parents went to school is just wrong yet we somehow accept the practice instead of working to change it. Where are the faculty senates speaking out on this? Where are the student newspapers challenging this unethical practice? Where are the student protests?
How about a Change.org campaign to end this most un-American practice in 2017.
“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 Hurwitz study says exactly that. He concludes that AA is the strongest hook, closely followed by recruited athlete. The strength of legacy was a good bit less – about the same as being Latino.
“Does anyone else wonder why legacy admissions still exist at all?”
Some high end schools (like MIT) don’t do legacy admissions at all. You can see why that makes sense for them – their brand is “we are the smartest geeks in the world!” more than “we are family.”
Fact is legacy admissions (if not overdone) make a lot of sense for the schools. Very much like ED admissions, legacy admissions help the schools enroll very well qualified students at a high yield rate and with lower overall financial aid cost. Legacy also has some positive impacts on donations and alumni involvement.
Sure it would be nice if money didn’t enter into things. But everyone (even Harvard) has a budget to meet.
Would you prefer that Harvard do more Jared Kushner deals (Jared’s donor dad is not a Harvard guy) rather than legacy?
Yes, indeed they do. This article from the Harvard Crimson last week lays out in some detail how difficult it’s been for Harvard to raise the money needed to renovate most of their 12 residential houses, many of which were built around 80 years ago: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/3/30/house-renewal-capital-campaign/ . As the article says, “Between an underperforming endowment, dwindling reserves, cumbersome architectural regulations, and lukewarm support from donors, House renewal is an uphill battle.”
@pantha33m and @Dolemite, in that study it wasn’t a percent increase. It was a PERCENTAGE POINT increase. So if a standard applicant has a 10% chance, a legacy doesn’t have a 14% chance (percentage) , but a 50% chance (percentage point)!!! The implications of that study are HUGE.
I’ve seen first hand where a grossly lesser qualified (3.8/1800 SAT), Stanford legacy candidate was accepted over a better (4.2/2340), non-legacy candidate from the same high school.
Per the report: “In other words, if a nonlegacy applicant faced a 15 percent chance of admission, a primary legacy applicant with identical credentials would have a 60 percent chance of getting in.”
Stanford flat out told us in a letter sent to all alums whose kids were applying that the legacy admit rate was close to 30%.(2012) Those 30 percenters must have been mighty special, because our 2340, salutatorian, NMF, 4.6+ daughter was rejected.
Even if the acceptance rate for legacies is about 2 times that of other people - we don’t know how much of this is because legacies are more likely to be better qualified. They will have parents educated at top colleges, be relatively more affluent, be raised in an environment that gears them for high-achievement/college admissions, etc. Until someone publishes data that lists the SAT Scores of normal applicants compared to Legacy applicants, it’s very difficult to reach a proper conclusion.
It’s beyond SAT scores, @reuynshard. The legacies are more likely to go to prep schools and high-quality high schools well-known to the admissions offices, so their academic records are going to be given greater credit. “Normal” applicants may have 3.9 GPAs from ordinary high schools; equivalent (or even somewhat lower) grades from Exeter, etc., will be considered better qualifications.
It is not easy for anyone on the outside of the admissions office of a super selective holistic admissions college to figure out how large the legacy preference is. Such a college gets large numbers of applicants who are clustered near the high end of the range in stats, so most of the distinguishing factors between such applicants are the subjectively graded ones. Without access to all of the applications including essays, recommendations, extracurricular lists, etc. and how the college instructs admission readers to evaluate them in holistic review, it is difficult to come up with a strong conclusion on the effect of legacy preference. Obviously, the colleges in question do not want to release any such information.
Actually, Hurwitz does address that. If Harvard legacies are more likely to get into Harvard than YP and vice versa, then that’s the legacy effect not student quality.
This gets into another issue that seems to come up every few months: whether BS helps or hurts in the admissions process. A lot of posters seem to come down on the side of it being either neutral or even slightly negative for admissions, with many BS students who would have done better in admissions by being a big fish in a small pond.
@roethlisburger my personal view from up close on this is that going to a strong prep or boarding school, with all the education, counseling and other opportunities it offers, makes it much more likely you’ll get into a top-20 university or LAC, but you may find the line to the tippy-tops has a lot of connected, capable legacies and highly-qualified URMs on it in front of you.
At a Yale information session a few years ago, a parent asked about legacy. The student who was leading the session said that legacy had little influence, but being a legacy meant that your application wouldn’t “slip through the cracks” (his exact wording). Based on things I have heard from admissions officers and things I have read, it sounds like most schools have a special committee that reviews the legacy decisions at the end of the admissions cycle, to verify and evaluate the decisions in the broader context of that year’s applicant pool as well as the legacy applicant pool. So at the very least, most legacy applications get a second review, which is more than what most applicants will get - and that can certainly be an advantage.
Back when my older son was applying to Stanford the only kids who got into S from our school were athletes. They had 1200/1600 scores. No one with 1400+ scores was admitted at all. S also takes a lot of CA students which leaves less room for out-of-staters.
“At a Yale information session a few years ago, a parent asked about legacy. The student who was leading the session said that legacy had little influence.”
This is wrong. At such a high level of selectivity, a small hook can be 100% outcome determinative.
Say you are running in the finals of the 100 meter dash. You have to be pretty fast to make it into the final. No undeserving slowpokes get to that point. But once in the final, let’s say the rules deduct 0.1 seconds off of your time.
Doesn’t sound like much – a blink of the eye. You obviously deserve to be there and are competitive with the other runners. That tiny edge does not guarantee you will win the race. But with that tiny edge in such a competitive race, your chances of earning a medal are hugely enhanced.
Look – Hurwitz had the best possible data on this (short of hooking the admission deans up to a polygraph machine). He examined the actual application file of one legacy applicant applying to the legacy school and similarly selective non-legacy schools. So the credentials are IDENTICAL. He did that exercise several thousand times.
His conclusion – legacy is alive and well and bigger than you think.
Agree that it is, but, again, what Hurwitz didn’t/couldn’t get into is: (i) the correlation/causation point I alluded to above (legacies are likely to be high-SES and therefore produce better apps, while their families are likely to be particularly generous/involved at the legacy school and no other); and (ii) differentiation among different kinds of legacies. At the tippy-tops, I think legacy status by itself + $2.75 won’t do much more than get you on the subway. Legacy status plus (in ascending order) major involvement, big donations, other hook (e.g., recruited athlete/URM), celebrity status or real development potential is much more powerful. The tippy-tops still deny ~70-~80% of their legacy applicants, after all - and, in aggregate, the apps from legacies are probably significantly stronger than the overall pool.
@DeepBlue86 makes my point much better than I did. Of course being a legacy matters when all else is equal, but does it matter when all else is not equal and taking into account all the other advantages many legacy kids might have? And does it matter if you have not been a super-generous donor (defined in the Ivies as being $multi-millions)?
One other anecdotal point is that in my experience, legacy parents have, if nothing else, access to admissions, alumni and/or development representatives who give them early handicapping as to their child’s chances, especially on the downside. Some of my most plugged-in alumni friends were counseled in such a way that they didn’t even bother having their kids apply.
Northwesty- I think legacy is alive and well and MUCH smaller than you think.
I am constantly surprised by the number of my classmates whose kids went to Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell and Columbia after being rejected from Brown. I am never surprised when I hear neighbors and friends proudly tell the world that little Sally is applying to XYZ and they know they’ve got a “finger on the scale” because she’s a legacy (that’s what most folks think) and am rarely surprised when little Sally gets waitlisted.
Agree with DeepBlue. Legacy can be meaningful when paired with something else the college wants (athletic talent, unusual musical or artistic achievement, substantial philanthropy, otherwise “famous parent” -think Senator or Mayor of a major city or Tony award winner). But kid is a high scoring well rounded nice kid and mom is a teacher, dad’s a social worker from a suburb with good schools… yawn. This is where the 80% of legacy rejections happens. It’s NOT kids who score 590 on their SAT’s at colleges where the mean is in the 700’s. Those parents know the kid isn’t getting in to their alma mater and they spare them the effort of applying (and I’ve known some of these families as well). It’s the kids who look like credible and sometimes strong candidates on paper- but other than legacy, there’s nothing else of strategic interest.