<p>Well, then, whatever, screw them. Really. If they aren’t going to take applications at face value, then the heck with them.</p>
<p>^^^^yes, level of interest IS important, but once you get past the ED/EA round why would adcoms assume that a kid would prefer his parent’s school to theirs if there is little difference in their status. Redroses, are you suggesting Dartmouth or Penn would not admit a Harvard legacy in RD? Or admit them only if they stated it was their first choice? Go ahead and call me naive, but I just don’t think that is happening.</p>
<p>If this type of stuff doesn’t really happen, then why did schools want a list of all the other schools my S was applying to?</p>
<p>Why would a school possibly be interested in this, other than as a yield management tool? Why else would they care?</p>
<p>I am sure there are students (and their parents) who feel entitled to be accepted at the “dream school”, and would blame anything, including being a legacy at another school, for the rejection.</p>
<p>I think if kid is legacy at College A through mom, and legacy at College B through dad, and applies to both College A and College B, the adcoms should investigate whether the kid loves his mom or his dad more to ascertain where his loyalties lie.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You can’t be serious. From a marketing perspective, if I were in their shoes, I would <em>absolutely</em> want to know what my competitive set is, regardless of whether I was trying to second-guess other schools’ admissions and rejections and / or second-guess the applicants’ preferences and strategies.</p>
<p>OK wildwood, I think you’re naive. Just look at the cross admit numbers that are widely available. Almost no one chooses Dartmouth over Harvard, much less a legacy.</p>
<p>^But with only around a 40% admit rate for legacies at Harvard (which may seem high for H but really are not good odds) why would those other schools pass up on a great candidate for fear they’ll end up at Harvard. I mean what is the yield at those schools anyway? Under 50%? So they are obviously admitting a lot of kids who won’t end up there. (And most of those kids obviously don’t end up at Harvard).</p>
<p>“many colleges say that level of interest is a factor, even an important factor, in admissions. Don’t you believe that they mean this?”</p>
<p>Yes, I do. I just don’t think that legacy status at a rival is a strong enough yield predictor that ultracompetitive schools care about it much. Surely things like visiting campus repeatedly, sending the application early in the season, expressing enthusiasm in the interview, etc. are the primary metrics for level of interest.</p>
<p>If anyone can come up with statistics, I’m willing to be convinced, but I don’t see any evidence that being a Cornell legacy hurts you at Dartmouth.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>…:)</p>
<p>Hanna, ivies and their peers do not keep track of demonstrated interest. Yet they have cross admit data for more than a century.</p>
<p>Wildwood, adcom have a very good idea who will get admitted at rival schools. They have a very good idea in the Dartmouth admissions office which of the H legacies will be given the nod. And today, as the gap closes between the example we’re using, Harvard/Dartmouth, the schools are coming very close to having the same admissions standards and if they want the student, so does H. And they will be highly unlikely to win that cross admit battle.</p>
<p>It’s a huge feather in the cap of an admissions office to raise yield.</p>
<p>^You can raise yield a lot more effectively by showing candidates the love. My younger son was accepted to Chicago EA. They wrote him a personalized note about his application essay in a holiday card, sent a winter scarf, sent multiple books of essay, a calendar. My son recognized that they were courting him, but admitted that the flattery made Chicago all that much more appealing. I think that, and perhaps a good ad campaign is a lot more effective than rejecting kids you think might be accepted by rival colleges. </p>
<p>(And looking at our high school’s Naviance data there is only one school in the country of all the ones that my sons considered that looks like it might have Tufts syndrome. And it’s not Tufts.)</p>
<p>
It’s basically the same thing. You can call it “marketing data” if you want. And I think it would be pretty inaccurate for finding a “competitive set” at the application stage , with kids applying to 15-20 colleges these days.</p>
<p>My S was asked where he was going to attend as part of the process of turning down the schools he decided not to attend. This will give a much better picture of who your competition is, IMO.</p>
<p>Flattery may work on some, but Chicago could write love letters all day long to kids who will be admitted to HYPS and others and will probably lose the cross admit battle.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Wildwood, adcom have a very good idea who will get admitted at rival schools. They have a very good idea in the Dartmouth admissions office which of the H legacies will be given the nod.
[/quoteo]
</p>
<p>Oh please, like everyone applying to an Ivy applies to multiple ones.</p>
<p>Since Harvard/Dartmouth is the example of the moment, just how many qualified Harvard legacies are applying to Dartmouth for this to be a statistically significant problem? 10? 100? 1,000?</p>
<p>2009-'10 Dartmouth Stats:</p>
<p>Applicants 16,538
Admitted 2,150
Attending 1,053
Yield 49%
ED Admits 401 ([Dartmouth</a> admits 401 students through early decision](<a href=“http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2008/12/11.html]Dartmouth”>http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2008/12/11.html))
Yield on Non-ED admits ~ 43% (652/1498) {(1053-401)/(2150-401)}</p>
<p>Assuming that 10% (65) of the 652 RD admits are Crimson double-agents and all 65 choose not to attend Dartmouth, the RD yield drops from 43% to 39% and the overall yield moves from 49% to 46%. To this uninformed outsider that hardly seems like a devastating loss of prestige given that in any year yield bounces a point or two. Furthermore, I also think it’s highly unlikely that Dartmouth would “lose” all 65 Harvard legacies, thus issue becomes even smaller.</p>
<p>In the last week on CC there have been threads on legacy having too much influence. legacy not having enough influence and published reports on how legacy shouldn’t exist as a factor. Now we’re talking about how legacy at one school will hurt you at another. Maybe I am kidding myself, but this whole discussion strikes me as the stuff of urban legend. I fully believe Redroses’ anecdotes, but blowing up a handful of examples into admissions office subterfuge seems like little more than a conspiracy theorist’s dream.</p>
<p>Vince, while I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a published study, 9 years of college counseling at a NYC top prep school where top college legacies were the norm generated more than casual observation. My job was to know adcom, to regularly talk to them about our candidates and to land my charges in the best possible place. It was a negotiation, I told adcom who they would yield and if I didn’t keep my word, they held it against me and the school.</p>
<p>To think a full point where yield is concerned is unimportant is to not understand the adcom world. They care. A lot. Their careers hinge on these things. It’s a strange world, but it’s just another industry where moving needles matters. Your profit margins are higher, your rate of law suits is lower, your yield higher, it’s all the same.</p>
<p>Adcom spend lots of time manipulating yield. Take more ED, hire a better enrollment manager, it’s competitive out there. Make your strategy tighter.</p>
<p>This might be of interest, cross admit data from a few years ago:
[The</a> New York Times > Week in Review > Image > Collegiate Matchups: Predicting Student Choices](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/17/weekinreview/20060917_LEONHARDT_CHART.html]The”>The New York Times > Week in Review > Image > Collegiate Matchups: Predicting Student Choices)</p>
<p>Redroses, I think your view might be colored precisely because you were a counselor at a top NYC prep school with tons of legacies. Maybe in that world, where you had to negotiate the admits with the adcom, those kind of trade-offs exist. But nowadays, those kind of applicants are just a small part of the admissions landscape, and there are plenty of legacies throughout the country that are not from that type of elite school and that don’t have GCs that are making promises like that. Hopefully, they do take people from those more average settings, who may possess all types of sought after attributes, at face value.</p>
<p>I agree, things work very differently at elite prep schools. My kids’ GCs had no idea what their first choices were. In the case of my oldest son he ultimately chose Carnegie Mellon over Harvard. CMU did not win the admit battle until he visited by the way. Younger son deliberately had no first choice, and spent weeks trying to decide between Chicago and Tufts.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt at all that having the GC tell an adcom that school X is Susie’s first choice. I just wonder how many times that assurance had to be made because the adcom had concerns about Susie’s legacy status elsewhere.</p>