So that older study is talking about percentage point increases - to say that a legacy applicant might have a 23 percentage point increase in the probability of acceptance…that is a HUGE boost. While the analysis is old, put that in current terms.
Imagine that we are talking about an overall acceptance rate of 20% (via early decision, which is where legacy matters). If there is a 23 percentage point increase in the probability of acceptance, that increases that 20% to 43%. That is HUGE.
Many schools, even Ivies, publish stats on the percentage of their ED accepted students who are legacies and those legacies comprises a substantial portion of the total.
There are a TON of applicants who meet the high quality threshold for Ivies and most are not accepted. In other words, there are lots and lots of applicants with stellar test scores, perfect grades, and amazing extras and still, lots of those do not get admitted to any Ivy school. To be at that level AND a legacy provides a substantial advantage in admissions. It is what it is.
@soxmom “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).” So…are the grads going to continue to support the school now that your son was rejected?
Mathematically speaking, there are going to be a lot of legacy rejections. If each legacy has > 1 child who applies, eventually the percentage of legacies will plateau as the number of admitted legacies approaches either 100% or the level the college reserves for non-legacy applicants (e.g. first time college students, athletes, etc.)
One thing being left out in this analysis is that being a legacy of another top college, especially an “upstream” one, HURTS you. In other words, if you are a very strong candidate and you are a legacy from Harvard, Yale or Princeton is a bit less likely to admit you IF you did not apply early.
It’s been quite a while, but my kid was a legacy at a “second tier” Ivy, i.e, not HYP. Kid’s dad and I had gone to law school at a school in the HYS law school group. Of course, my kid’s first choice was a college we had NO affiliation with. One of the many books I read explained that not only does being a legacy boost your chances more if you apply early, but unless you apply early to them it can HURT you at other top colleges.
Lets say you are a very strong candidate who is a legacy at H. The other colleges know full well that statistically H legacies are LESS likely to enroll at Y or P if they are admitted. If you use your SCEA bid for Y or P, that overcomes the presumption a bit and increases your chances of admission. If you don’t, those colleges may assume you used it for H and that if you have been admitted to H or are admitted in the regular round you’re not going to enroll in Y or P.
So, if a H legacy does apply SCEA to Harvard and gets in but keeps open his applications to Y and P and is rejected by them in the regular round, it may be that being a H legacy actually hurt him at Y or P.
“And does it matter if you have not been a super-generous donor (defined in the Ivies as being $multi-millions)?”
About 15% of the class at the high end Ivies, year in and year out, are legacies. So about 200-300 kids per year at HYP. I really doubt there are anywhere near that many unique seven figure donors for each year’s application rodeo.
Most of the legacies that I know are more of the doctor/lawyer/banker kid variety. Suburban 1-2%-ers but not hedge fund plutocrats. I’m sure most are good school citizens – help with interviewing, go to reunions, write an annual check of $5-10k.
And if their kids do get in, they pay full sticker price. Which is really, imho, what the game is about for the schools. Almost all of those parents will send more money to the alma mater for four years tuition than they will in a lifetime of donating. And since the large majority of legacies get rejected, you’d think the legacy program could have a significant overall negative impact on donations post-rejection.
The volume and quality of the data Hurwitz (290,000 applications for 133,000 unique applicants) absolutely overwhelms all limited anecdotal evidence and surmises. He says legacy is big and bigger than you think. Which, by the way, is what the prior study on this (Espenshade) also found.
Surprising to me how folks are so resistant to go with a systematic study of a massively larger/better data set than their personal anecdotal experience.
@northwesty , you make an excellent point. Price increases well above the rate of inflation are starting to make most of the high end schools unaffordable, or at least very painful even for upper middle class parents who pay rack rate. We are now approaching $300K for an undergraduate degree at many of those institutions. That is going to reduce the supply of parents willing to pay full boat and make legacies even more important.
I saw it last year when my son and his friends were accepted to Ivys/equivalents who turned them down for in-state Michigan. Their parents attended Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, Penn etc. and could not see the value of spending an extra $175-$200K.
Note that Michigan also prefers legacies, perhaps for the same reason, but that conflicts with some of the reasons that public universities exist for in the first place.
Northwesty- in the example I gave (schoolteacher married to a social worker) the family is NOT necessarily full pay, depending on where they live, family size, assets, etc.
Perhaps that’s the difference- I have many classmates who are in the “do gooder” professions- Rabbi’s and Ministers, social workers, addiction counselors, public defenders, archivists at historical societies, etc. They believe themselves to be successful graduates of our alma mater… and yet their kids seem to do better at some “peer schools”.
They aren’t giving 5-10K per year previous to their kids admissions cycle- heck, if they give 5K over a 20 year period that’s a very significant chunk of their charitable giving.
So your comment about “who are you going to believe- anecdotes or the data?” needs to be tempered with reality. Are you talking about the children of the oral surgeon married to the litigator? Yes- they are full pay, but not 7 figure donors. And my guess is that your evidence suggests that these are the kids getting in at a much higher rate than their stats would suggest.
But the top tier schools also produce professionals who work for the public good. Are their children not worthy of the “legacy tip” except when the parent is also famous???
However, legacies are all kids of college graduates, who generally tend to be higher earning than the overall parent population from which non-legacy kids come from, even if the alumni parents are not all in the no-financial-aid range of income. Legacy preference does have the effect of tipping the admit pool toward being less needy of financial aid.
@northwesty, I generally agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but I think there’s greater nuance to the situation. You say:
100% agree. But those “suburban 1-2%-ers” are likely to have produced very strong applications, because they’re high-SES (which also means they’re likely to be full-payers, something else the school likes, as you note). Legacy is correlated with high-SES, which is correlated with better apps, which is correlated with better admit odds.
What I’m wondering is: who do you think are the 70%-80% of the legacy applicants who are denied? Based on my experience, a lot of them aren’t bricks - they’re smart, capable kids who weren’t as high-SES or plugged-in, or didn’t have some special talent. Legacy did nothing for them. On the other hand, the more generous and involved the parents were, the more the legacy mattered for the purposes of admission.
What I find misleading about Hurwitz is that there’s no attention paid to something that I haven’t seen anyone dispute, which is that not all legacies are created equal and if you’re a wealthy, well-connected one (from a well-known school and preferably with a special talent), your chances are going to be much, much better than the child of a small-town lawyer who happened to go to Harvard.
It’s all very well to point to the Hurwitz stats and say that legacy confers a major advantage in the aggregate, so long as you recognize that some people get little to no advantage from it, and others are a slam dunk because their parents gave $50 million to Harvard. The fact that the parents also happened to have graduated from Harvard probably by itself hardly influenced the admissions decision at all - there were 50 million other reasons to take the kid if his stats were good enough and he’d managed to avoid brushes with the law.
“Northwesty- in the example I gave (schoolteacher married to a social worker) the family is NOT necessarily full pay, depending on where they live, family size, assets, etc.”
Sure, but the schools are managing pools of thousands of apps year after year. They are playing the odds. The demographics of the legacy pool overall make it a very good pond for the schools to fish in to find well-qualified full payors. Even if every single fish in that pool is not a full payor.
If they wanted to, schools could just come out and say “we give preference to rich folks.” That would be much more direct and efficient, but would also come with some backlash (e.g. Pere Kushner (NYU grad fyi) buying Harvard seats for his two sons).
Much more subtle and justifiable for the schools instead to give breaks to legacies and/or kids who apply ED.
I think they are both right. Being a legacy probably increases your odds a lot. But the difference between a 10% acceptance rate and a 5% acceptance rate isn’t really something that you can when you look on a more anecdotal level. I do think (from my anecdotal data) that even the legacies aren’t being accepted without bring more to the table than good grades and good scores. And judging whether that other stuff, is good enough is always a tough one. It’s not just money. Our gifts were in the hundreds not thousands of dollars
My niece was a Harvard double legacy with nice, but probably not earthshaking ECs.Top of her class, good scores. I didn’t feel her parents (who don’t live on CC like me) really understood what she needed to do to stand out. I think she might have been able to sell herself (and those ECs), but it would have meant writing essays that were a bit daring. I also definitely got the impression that the teachers at my kid’s high school had figured out how to write the kind of recommendations that make people pay attention. Obviously I have no idea what my niece had in the way of letters, and I didn’t see her essays. There was unfortunately really no way I could offer to help without being seen as interfering.
“What I’m wondering is: who do you think are the 70%-80% of the legacy applicants who are denied? Based on my experience, a lot of them aren’t bricks - they’re smart, capable kids who weren’t as high-SES or plugged-in, or didn’t have some special talent.”
My guess is that many of them are regular/normal smart kids who are just average or a bit below average in the applicant pool. If you are in the 45th percentile of the Harvard pool and Dad went to Harvard, you are qualified and you definitely are going to give a Harvard application a shot.
That’s exactly what happen with my kids. The weaker one (but still totally qualified) got denied at my non-Ivy school (22% admit rate) which would have been slightly reachy without the tip. For my stronger one, the legacy tip made the school almost a safety. Many non-legacy classmates/friends with identical stats got denied, deferred or waitlisted.
One place I think legacy preferences are dead: Vanderbilt. They seem to give no consideration to legacy whatsoever these days. I know of two different kids of board members who were denied (maybe waitlisted, but definitely not admitted).
“Note that Michigan also prefers legacies, perhaps for the same reason, but that conflicts with some of the reasons that public universities exist for in the first place.”
And most states stopped acting along the reasons public Us were founded. That started in the 70s in many older publics. U’s gotta do what they gotta do now. to maintain.
Among the high end publics, UCB and UCLA don’t do legacy admissions.
UVA and UNC do, but limit legacy preference to just out-of-state applicants. Which means that the legacies only have an edge over other OOS applicants (who generally face admit standards higher than those used for IS) and do not displace any in-state taxpayer kids. The UVA and UNC legacy policies presumably help those schools sell more OOS seats at full price.
The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. Even at Harvard, which is an anomaly compared to the rest of the Ivy league, what percent of legacy parents are writing $50M+ checks?
“others are a slam dunk because their parents gave $50 million to Harvard.”
Kushner’s father was not a Harvard alum as I keep pointing out. But the $2.5 million non-Harvard dollars were green enough to get Jared and his brother into Harvard.
Harvard admits 300 legacies a year. I’d bet you can count their annual development case admits on both hands. Which don’t have to be alumni donors.