How much it helps a particular kid will vary a lot.
Not all school legacy policies are equal.
Penn considers grandkids legacies. Harvard doesn’t. Penn says grad, law, biz and med school diplomas are good to make the kids legacies for undergrad admissions. Only Harvard College degrees count for Harvard undergrad. If you want legacy treatment at Penn, you have to apply ED (which itself provides a benefit). So guess what – Penn has a lot of legacies!!
Duke cuts legacy applicants a bigger break than Brown does. Notre Dame is 20-25% legacy year after year – about double the share you see at other top schools. At UVA, you can only get legacy treatment if you are an out-of-state applicant. But public Ivy UCLA and UCB don’t do legacy at all. Etc. etc. etc. etc.
Some schools only give legacy treatment if the parents are involved in the school (including regular but modest donations). At most schools, legacy admissions is more about enrolling kids whose parents are likely to be able to full pay the tuition and won’t need fin aid.
Major donations are always good. But it doesn’t really matter if the major donor parents are alums or not. So long as the money is green, the money is green. Jared Kushner’s dad didn’t go to Harvard after all.
And, most important, some legacy applicants are stronger students than others.
At most selective schools, the majority of legacy applicants still get rejected. But legacy applicants overall do much better (pound for pound) than similar non-legacy applicants. But typically not as as good as recruited athletes applicants or URM applicants do.
@agb2002 imo, it could raise a question when the kid is a truly great applicant, would be wanted by many top schools, but has H or S legacy or double legacy. There are lots of ways in the app and supp to show you understand your match, took the time to explore various aspects. Or not. You don’t want to miss that, fir schools she’s truly interested in.
Adcoms dont know which alums gave what. Only names of big donors, the sort with their own coddling, their own development rep, etc, who might make contact with admissions.
Legacy treatment in my experience has varied from kid to kid at the same school! My older child was beckoned by my alma mater, courted, communicated with frequently, and she ultimately decided to apply ED. She got in and has been very happy there. Fast forward three years when younger sister is applying to schools, and HER legacy status seems to be completely irrelevant. It’s like they just decided not to care anymore. School accepted her and gave her the small automatic legacy scholarship in addition to a big merit award, but since sending the admittance letter they again seem to be ignoring her. Other schools she’s been admitted to are chasing her to commit, but this one seems to be taking her completely for granted.
ok but your alma mater accepted both your kids right and gave them merit awards, so that is not being hurt as a legacy. It may have helped.
I find it very hard to believe that legacy would ever hurt, at worst it’s neutral or not a factor. I guess in these days of social media, you could say some bad things publicly about your alma mater, in which case you probably wouldn’t recommend your kids applying there anywhere.
Just because it’s extremely difficult for non-hooked* average excellent kids to get in to Ivies/equivalents these days doesn’t mean being legacy hurts.
Being legacy isn't really a hook at any top school these days. At some places, it's barely a tip.
Being legacy is absolutely a hook at many top schools. For example, an internal analysis from Harvard OIR is at http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-421-112-May-1-2013-Memorandum.pdf . It found that being a legacy offered a greater admissions benefit than did being a URM, and the majority of legacy applicants who had an academic rating in the upper ~half of applicants were admitted, while less than 10% of unhooked kids with the same rating were admitted.
The study at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/btl/files/michael_hurwitz_-_qp_12-12-09.pdf has an interesting approach where the author analyzes admission decisions from tens of thousands of students who apply to multiple “elite” colleges and compares decisions at that student’s legacy colleges to the student’s non-legacy colleges, reducing the effects of the more subjective additional parts of the application. For top 30 “elite” colleges he found an average benefit of 7.6x greater odds of admission for a primary legacy (secondary legacies benefit was small), which is the same order of magnitude as the previously linked Harvard OIR analysis and Harvard SFFA analysis. He found the degree of that legacy benefit increased as SAT score increased for primary legacies (not secondary legacies), as college selectivity tier increased, and was far greater among early applicants than RD applicants. He estimated 15.5x greater odds for primary legacy applicants who apply during the early cycle instead of RD.
However, there are also several top schools where legacy offers little benefit. For example, MIT and Caltech both say that they do not consider legacy in admissions (I realize Caltech’s CDS conflicts with public university statements/publications), and their admissions decisions appear to support this claim. I’ve yet to hear of any college where being a legacy hurts your chances.
@Data10, I said “these days” for a reason. The time period looked at in those studies were classes entering in 2005-2012 and 2007, respectively. In elite college admissions, a decade ago is almost a different era. Comparing the entering classes of 2008 to 2018, the number of apps to Penn and Columbia have nearly doubled. Apps to nearly all Ivies (exception is Dartmouth) have gone up by at least 50%. Back then, half the Ivies still had double digit RD acceptance rates (Cornell’s RD rate was 20%). Now none do.
But yes, I probably should have qualified what I said about the importance of legacy at top schools (not very) to the RD round. That, however, is still the round where the vast majority of applicants apply and so on Naviance, it would look like legacy doesn’t provide much advantage.
The Harvard lawsuit sample extended to class of 2019 – 4 years ago. For the class of 2019, Harvard’s expert ran some simulations of how admissions decisions would have changed without hooks and with other SFFA suggested changes. He found the number of admitted legacies in the class of 2019 would have dropped by 70-84% (depending on simulation model), which is a larger drop than occurred all other hook groups except recruited athletes. Should we really assume the legacy benefit has nearly completely reversed over the 4 years since the class of 2019, without any evidence of this occurring?
The study I linked above found that the degree of primary legacy benefit increased as both college selectivity and applicant test scores increased. If anything, this would suggest that the legacy benefit would become more significant, now that admit rates are lower. When it becomes increasingly unlikely to be admitted, hooks tend to become increasingly important.
I’d say, one needs to stand back and ask, “Greater chance than what?” None of this is done in a vacuum, just stats or status. The memo author admits caveats.
It helps to believe not all high stats, seemingly impressive kids actually put forth a good app/supp, have the right LoRs, a good interview report, appropriate Why Us, etc… I know this is a touchy subject, but a random error, weakness, triviality, lapse in judgment, etc, can override.
You’ve got to see this in Chances threads. No matter how many praise an OP, they are offering opinions. No matter how many of those Chancers get admitted, their theads are only a slice of what an app/supp asks for.