@OHMomof2 Just to clarify - UNC-CH only considers legacy for OOS applicants which is only 18% of the admitted class. So a small number.
It definitely “may” count if you’re OOS (and there is a “formal preference”?) but if you are in state it’s not unless it’s “part of your larger story”?
Sounds like thy consider it either way, IMO.
Aw, geez. Start with an opinion, find what you think supports it, and then tell us what’s true or not? That’s so i
incomplete. I used to warn my kids not to fall into, “I think it, so it must be true.” And its sister, “I read it somewhere, so I know it is.” That’s not solid.
So you don’t like legacies? That doesn’t mean they’re unworthy on their own merits. You really don’t know and many schools not only attest to their strong qualifications, but reject the better part of those applying because they are not.
Legacy acceptances rate at Harvard is 33%. That means that 67% of legacy applicants are denied. Legacy is a help but not a guarantee.
And as for the number of wealthy enrolled, you get that from stats about who does matriculate. That’s after the studnt has made his/her decision. It would help to consider why lower SES kids may not enroll.
Adcoms know community and local demographics, how many a hs sends to 2 or 4 year colleges, at all. They are not simply looking for wealthy URMs to boost some stat. (All wealthy kids suffer their own assumptions; nothing about being wealthy makes them top candidates.) But many lower SES admits choose not to attend colleges outside their local area.
So don’t get confused by after-the-fact figures.
“You really don’t know and many schools not only attest to their strong qualifications,”
Ok, so you’re saying we shouldn’t believe everything we hear or see wrt admissions, esp on the internet, but we should believe everything an adcom says about legacies? Adcoms maybe are good people, but they’re humans, so they lie, unless you think they’re on the level of Lincoln or Gandhi wrt how those men handled the truth. So barring that, I would trust what adcoms do (we love legacies because of money) than what they say (legacies are future nobel laureates).
“Legacy acceptances rate at Harvard is 33%”
Which is about ten times the RD acceptance rate. That’s a big advantage to have, without actually doing anything to earn it.
I’m hitting a paywall with the article, but from the thread comments, I get the impression that it talks about some colleges favoring students who are slightly below the arbitrary Pell grant threshold and not favoring students who are slightly above the threshold. So colleges can report relatively high Pell grant numbers, but students who are low income and just short of the Pell grant threshold are out of luck. All colleges don’t do this. Instead the paper lists some publics that appear to favor Pell grant applicants and lists some publics that appear to give no/litte special preference for Pell grant applicants beyond other lower income students. This does not seem shocking to me. If you give a positive benefit for increasing the number of students who are above/below an arbitrary threshold, some colleges will favor students who are above/below that arbitrary threshold. There are many other examples, such as some colleges setting maximum class size to n-1, if USNWR penalizes colleges for having class sizes of >= n.
Legacy preference is a different issue that has only indirect and relatively small implications on Pell grant percentages or general low income percentages at selective colleges. Pell grant income thresholds are typically on the order of <$30k – far below the median income in the United States. At highly selective private colleges, most students are far, far above this income level – both legacy and non-legacy. Legacies tend to have far higher average income than non-legacies (~half of legacies reported >$500k income in Harvard freshman survey), but very few from both groups are near Pell grant levels or true low income thresholds. If Harvard removed their legacy preference, then they’d have fewer full pay kids, but still would have few Pell grant kids.
I don’t know if Harvard gives a preference for Pell grants, but they do give a preference for lower income kids via a “disadvantaged” flag. This "disadvantaged " flag is frequently given to students with income of less than ~$80k income based on indications of SES from file, including things like parents occupation… well above Pell grant thresholds. The primary reason why Harvard has few lower income kids in spite of giving admission preference and having FA with an estimated no cost to parents in calc for less than ~65k income is most high achieving lower income do not apply to selective private colleges, particularly ones located a good distance away from home.
Regarding the legacy admission preference numbers, the specific numbers presented in the Harvard lawsuit are below:
Overall Acceptance Rate – Legacy: 34%, Non-Legacy: 6%
Applicants with Above Average Academic Rating – Legacy: 55%, Non-Legacy: 15%
Harvard OIR Regression Analysis* – 11.0x greater odds of admission for legacy than non-legacy
Plantiff Regression Analysis* – 10.3x greater odds of admission for legacy than non-legacy
*Regression analysis estimates change in chance of admission for applicants with similar ratings in each category (academic, EC, personal, …), similar URM and other hook status, and similar dozens of other controls:
I don’t think there is any question that many legacies get a strong boost in chance of admission at Harvard and many (not all) other selective colleges. The admission boost for legacy appears to be significantly stronger than the boost for “disadvantaged” with less than US ~median income. Of course that doesn’t mean that admission is guaranteed for legacy, nor does it mean that legacies as a whole are not academically qualified.
Of course, what Data10 is implying and I am saying explicitly, is that, from the general population, the top 6% are selected, while, from legacies, the top 33%. So, from regular applicants, you need to be at the 94th percentile of applicants if you want to be accepted, while, if you’re a legacy, being at the top 67th percentile is enough. Which is why there are many more legacies who are relatively weak, compared to the non-legacy applicant pool.
Regarding “qualified”, that is Harvard’s decision. If they accept somebody, they declare them to be qualified. While the average SAT for accepted students at Harvard is 1520, that’s just because Harvard has decided to accept only students with SATs in the top percentiles of the applicants. Next year it may be a different criterion, or the number of applicants may drop, and Harvard will need to accept kids with lower SAT. That’s the whole point of “holistic admissions”. It means that there are no hard cutoffs in GPA or SAT, or in fact, in anything at all. So anybody can be considered as “qualified” if Harvard really wants them.
My daughter graduated in the top 10% of her IB class. The group of 110 students were all high achievers. The only ones that were accepted to the “top tier” schools were either Quest Bridge, Sport Scholars or had the diversity box checked and were full pay. It is hard to show our kids that hard work pays off when in the end they either need to be from a very poor or extremely rich family to be accepted to places like Duke, Northwestern, Brown…
That being said she has found so many opportunities at her pubic state school that she is attending for free. The student that went to Duke for free is struggling both socially and academically. Sometime what we perceive to be the “better school” is not when students do not take advantage of all their opportunities. In the end their hard work will pay off and they will be happy productive members of society.
https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/f4cForm indicates that an 18 year old dependent student with 48 year old married parents earning $57,600 (household of 3 with 1 in college) in Mississippi will get $652 of Pell grant.
For comparison, the median household income in Mississippi is $42,009, and the median household income in the US is $57,652.
Pell grant eligibility covers a significantly greater range of incomes than is commonly assumed here.
Note that my post said income was “typically” less than $30k, not exclusively. The report at https://trends.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/2017-trends-student-aid_0.pdf lists the following family income percentages among Pell grant recipients in table 18B. This report suggests a median family income of under $20k and the vast majority (but not 100%) under $30k family income.
No Dependents (22%) – 90% have income below $20k
Have Dependents (31%) – 49% have income below $20k
Dependent (47%) -- 38% have income below $20k
Overall – 53% have family income below $20k
Being from an exmtremely rich family is always an advantage. Being from a very poor family is only helpful in the very rare cases that those kids manage to succeed at a level that puts them in the range of the wealthy and upper middle class families.
Questbridge is, just itself, a very difficult admit. 918 match finalists out of 15k in 2017 - that’s Harvard-like difficulty. 2k more got admitted in regular admission. Somewhat easier but still 4 out of 5 get a no. Not surprising that hteose who make it through that process do well in admissions.
Sports Scholars is for recruit-able (URM?) athletes, not surprising they also do well. Being a recruited athlete is the largest preference there is at many elites.
“Checking the diversity box and full pay” suggests you know an awful lot about your kid’s classmates ethnicities and finances.
Your opinion is not unusual. But I really don’t think poor kids are making it harder for middle and upper middle class kids to get into elites.
OHMom - you said it much more diplomatically than I could.
Our HS had our first QuestBridge student, admitted to a great university. She is beyond impressive and deserving. It is amazing how she has succeeded considering her obstacles.
Folks make a lot of assumptions about knowing what other applicants are bringing to the table - the truth is you really have no idea.
I’m sure students who don’t get full rides to state schools are questioning why not also.
Im not sure I’ve seen envy of being “poor” anywhere else. And it’s based on nonsense - those in poverty still have a much harder time getting into college.
A more comprehensive look at the study in the OP -
I totally agree, but would add that holistic admissions makes success even more difficult than under a more purely academic focused admissions system. Every time GPAs are inflated, standardized tests dumbed down, and ECs emphasized, the odds for smart but poor kids get longer.
Don’t assume smart but poor means lesser. Or that some magical mist enshrouds wealthier kids. Everyone has to put in an app and money doesn’t fill the blanks or make up for faulty thinking.
If you look for moral or ethical justification of the framework for admissions at virtually all selective private universities, you’re unlikely to be satisfied. These places run themselves like businesses, balancing all kinds of institutional imperatives to assemble their classes, while staying broadly in line with their competitors. Why is only something like 20% of Harvard’s class reserved for pure academic superstars? Why does Harvard recruit around 200 athletes a year, many of them with academic qualifications far lower than those of the legacies they admit? Why and on what basis do they admit development cases, faculty brats, etc.? How do they calibrate the percentage of URMs, ORMs and first-gens? Why should they care if they have a kid from every state?
This is the world we live in. Harvard admits the particular collection of students it admits because it thinks that that group, for a myriad of reasons, is the group that best serves Harvard’s interests. And, as you say, they’re all qualified, because otherwise, they wouldn’t be admitted.
People like to talk about MIT as a shining example of meritocracy, but I would submit that, as arguably the top STEM-focused university in the world, primarily focused on producing the leading scientists and engineers of the next generation and with an enormous research franchise, MIT has a particular mission that is different from places like Harvard, and which enables MIT to run itself differently.
Harvard and its peers seek to grow and sustain themselves by having graduates who are powerful and influential in many different parts of society and walks of life. They want to have leaders in all kinds of communities and professions, including, yes, wealthy and prominent individuals, because that’s how Harvard accumulates resources to perpetuate its mission. If Harvard has graduates in prominent positions in government, the non-profit world, finance, business, entertainment, the arts, journalism, education, science, technology, sports and on and on, that benefits Harvard and its graduates by maximizing Harvard’s power and reach in society.
This is a world apart from a place like MIT, which seeks dominance in a much narrower area. Students choose it for very different reasons than Harvard, which is why, despite being in the same group of schools at the pinnacle of undergraduate education, Harvard gets twice as many applicants as MIT. About 10% of MIT students major in humanities or social sciences; close to 90% major in something under the STEM rubric (fewer than half do so at Harvard).
Also, nearly half of MIT’s budget comes from research revenues and less than 30% from gifts, bequests, the endowment and other investments. In contrast, at Harvard, only about 17% of the budget (which is nearly half again as large as MIT’s) comes from “sponsored support” (federal and non-federal awards and grants), while some 48% comes from gifts and investment income.
MIT is a scientific research juggernaut, supporting half its activities from this source, and income from its endowment, half the size of Harvard’s, is much less important to its activities. Harvard, on the other hand, isn’t able to rely on research revenues to anything like the degree MIT can, so accumulating gifts and growing the endowment is imperative for Harvard to maintain the scale and scope of its much broader range of activities.
This, I would submit, is the fundamental reason why Harvard pays much more attention to legacy applicants and big donors than MIT.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b63672bcef372eea958d8a5/t/5b883b6388251b3d342e2c95/1535654756426/MIT-CDS-2016-17.pdf
https://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2017-18.pdf
https://vpf.mit.edu/sites/default/files/downloads/TreasurersReport/MITTreasurersReport2018.pdf
https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/harvard_annual_report_2018_final.pdf
If applicants are “need blind” how do the schools know they are a pell grant level applicant? Shouldn’t all the financials be hidden? Can’t be a two way street. It is either blind or it isn’t.
Note that the Pell grant eligibility goes up to approximately the median income (see reply #29), so the “just above the Pell grant eligibility threshold” would be just above the median income. Yes, that may be only 1/4 of the income of the common “no financial aid” demographic of these forums, but it is higher than what people tend to commonly assume is “just above the Pell grant range”.
Plenty of applicant attributes are correlated to family money.
Also, the admissions office could be blind to all of that, but the financial aid office could offer good packages to those with Pell grants, but poor packages to those without. So then more of the Pell grant students will matriculate due to the school being affordable, but the “just above Pell grant threshold” students are more likely to find it unaffordable and not attend.