@CTTC, we did think it was poor form that we got a call from Annual Giving the same day our kid got waitlisted. I’m sure we’ll still support the school, just maybe not this year.
Well, @roethlisburger and @northwesty, here’s a data point from another of the tippy-tops. A New York Times article (from 2011) quotes Jeffrey Brenzel, then-dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, as saying:
The article itself is here: https://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/legacy-2/comment-page-4/
According to a Yale website, to be a Sterling Fellow “is an honor bestowed on alumni, parents, and friends who have given $1 million or more during their lifetime”.
So, something under 50% of children of donors whose families have given at least $1 million in their lifetime (and potentially many times that) who apply are (or were, in 2011) admitted to Yale. I’m guessing that the quality of this applicant pool is very high, since they’ve probably had the best schooling, counseling and access to educational and other opportunities. Also, some number of the Sterling children who weren’t Yale material were probably discouraged from applying.
Still, Yale’s overall admit rate in 2011 was about 7.5%, so one assumes that the admissions advantage for children of Sterling Fellows is (or was) significant. It’s worth noting, though, that you can be a child of a Sterling Fellow and not a legacy. I think it’s very hard if not impossible to disaggregate the legacy benefit from the generosity benefit, which is why Hurwitz didn’t try.
In regards to the title, “Are Legacy Preferences Dead,” they certainly aren’t at my school (Penn). I know way too many legacies lol
“We turn away 80 percent of our legacies, and we feel it every day,” Mr. Brenzel said, adding that he rejected more offspring of the school’s Sterling donors than he accepted this year (Sterling donors are among the most generous contributors to Yale). He argued that legacies scored 20 points higher on the SAT than the rest of the class as a whole."
That all makes sense to me. Since most legacies get turned down, legacy admissions would not be such a good idea if (as folks typically think) it is all about donations. But legacy admissions would make financial sense if the accepted students were likely to be full payors.
It also makes sense that the legacies (even though they get an admissions break) would have above average stats. The slots for kids with below median stats would be more likely to be used for kids whose hook is URM or athlete or Facebook founder or Rwandan refugee.
If your hook is primarily legacy (which quite often is going to be a well to do white kid from a private school) you need to have good stats. But because you are a legacy, your 34-35 ACT is much more likely to be picked from out of the huge pile of applications that also have those same high stats. Having a tie-breaker is very helpful if playing a game that has a lot of ties!!
Yes, really poor form!
The thing is, if you give money to a school before your kid applies, on the hope that it will help them get in, you can’t ask for the money back. Or I guess you can, but you won’t get it back. So it’s in the interest of schools to keep the expectations murky. They also have an institutional interest in not poking their donor base too much to find out how much of the money the receive is being given on the expectation that it will give someone an admissions advantage. In other words, there is a moral and ethical dimension to doing the math. As long as a school can avoid asking itself “is $20 million a year worth perpetuating affirmative action for the rich?” they don’t have to answer. Back in the 1980s I observed the movement at Stanford to get the university to divest in South Africa and the same willful ignorance was at stake. No one with the university would ever want to be pinned down on exactly how much it would cost to implement the divestment because then it would be obvious what a morally untenable position they held.
I guess, @northwesty, I don’t think it works quite like that. I think at most of these schools the kids who are on the radar of the development office are flagged and evaluated somewhat differently. To get on that radar, I’m reasonably sure you don’t have to have reached the top giving levels. There are a lot more of those kids than you’d think, and a lot of them are legacies. Did they get special consideration because they were legacies, or because of their development potential? I think at least as much the latter as the former - even though the development potential specifically for that university may only exist because the parents of the applicant happened to have graduated from there.
Once you get beyond that group, I think you’re right in saying that a lot of admitted legacies are high-stats, very capable kids who also happen to be full-payers. I think, though, that the 10-15% slice of the classes at the tippy-tops that are legacies is that size for a reason, which is that the slice is big enough to signal to alumni that legacy provides a preference, but small enough to suggest to the outside world that that preference isn’t very meaningful (and the slices have been steadily eroding as other institutional needs, e.g., the desire to admit a greater number of first-gens, increase in importance).
If alumni thought their kids had no preference at all, they wouldn’t feel like they were part of the university family to the same extent, and their enthusiasm - in the aggregate - to volunteer and donate would be dampened. So there are, within a range, a certain number of spots that are almost set aside for legacies, because it’s in the interest of the university to admit just enough of them. Does that mean legacy is a “tiebreaker”? Only in the sense that being a URM or a recruited athlete is a tiebreaker - there are a certain number, within limits, that the university thinks it’s in its interest to have. Of course, if all the legacies were demonstrably idiots, it would be a different story and the imperative to admit them wouldn’t be as great - but they’re not, and many of them are highly competitive in the context of the overall pool.
In other words, given the relatively fixed (albeit shrinking) size of the legacy slice of the class, I believe that the legacies who apply are competing as much with each other as the rest of the pool. Given the unrelenting financial needs of the universities, the higher-development-potential legacies are going to be more competitive - and if, in addition to that, you’re also high-stats, with a superior application and possibly a special talent, the odds should be ever in your favor. After that, in thinking about who else could fill out the slice, the focus will be on high-stats, attractive candidates, who often will be full payers (because being high-SES is correlated with being an attractive candidate, for many reasons). Accordingly, I’m not convinced that, given the circumstances, legacy is truly functioning as a tiebreaker with other, non-legacy candidates.
As of 2009, there were only 466 Sterling fellows at Yale. I agree the generosity benefit is likely to be mixed in with the legacy benefit, but I think the buy-in comes at a lower price point. I expect most admitted legacies come from families making 6-figure rather than 7 or 8-figure donations.
Agreed, @roethlisburger (see the first para of post #66) - and it might not even be as high as that, depending on perceived lifetime potential.