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[quote]
The analysis, which looks at Fall 2007 applicants to 30 elite schools, concludes that after better controlling for variables than previous researchers did, legacy preferences of all kinds increase ones chances of admissions by 23.3 percentage points. More importantly, primary legacy candidates (sons and daughters, as opposed to siblings, nephews, nieces, or grandchildren) see a whopping 45.1 percentage point increase in the chances of admission. What this means, as Ashburn explains, is that if a non-legacy applicant with a certain set of credentials has a 15 percent chance of admissions, a primary legacy applicant with identical credentials would have a 60 percent chance of getting in.
<p>I wish they would also include a comparison of the FA needs of the legacy admits versus the identical control applicants. Intuitively, I would assume that the top-30 elite school legacy’s families are more well-off than the control group. This should be factored in to the money benefit of admitting legacies, not just future alumni giving.</p>
<p>I would love to read this. Nothing in my lived experience suggests that admissions rates for “primary” legacies at elite colleges even approach 45%, much less 45% higher than some background admission rate. I am interested to see how, exactly, the researcher measured things like extracurricular activities or teacher recommendations, that he reportedly controlled for. And what, exactly, his 30 elite schools were. I’m not certain there ARE 30 “elite” colleges, especially if you exclude colleges that don’t give any legacy preference. I am very suspicious of the statement (in the HuffPo piece on this study) that he found the legacy effect to be most pronounced among the most selective and least selective colleges, and to me much less meaningful in between.</p>
<p>Also, I suspect there may be a major difference between high legacy/high yield colleges (colleges with lots of legacy applications that accept very few applicants, e.g. HYPS) and low legacy/low yield colleges (e.g. Amherst). And I would also like to know what the effect of ED is.</p>
<p>You really need a situation where the legacy candidate would not have been admitted but for the legacy tip to really prove your point. </p>
<p>To give an example of a couple of situations with which I am familiar, a student with a Stanford parent gets into Stanford but is also admitted to Harvard. Legacy help? I don’t think so. A student with a Stanford parent doesn’t get into Stanford and doesn’t get admitted to Harvard. No legacy tip working there…</p>
<p>I agree with JHS: “Nothing in my lived experience suggests that admissions rates for “primary” legacies at elite colleges even approach 45%, much less 45% higher than some background admission rate.”</p>
<p>Looks like legacies accepted at 36%, overall acceptance rate 11%.</p>
<p>Of course, this uses absolutely no controls, and I think it is natural to assume that children of legacies will have higher “stats” overall. Just something to throw into the mix. </p>
<p>Brown’s admit rate last year was about 9% for all applicants, and 36% for legacy applicants. I can’t remember the numbers for Princeton, but I think the effect was even more pronounced. (Cross-posted with above; I think more recent results from Princeton show more pronounced differences than the 2005 data.) This study is consistent with other recent work on legacy admissions. </p>
<p>The data are drawn from over 133,000 applicants, so the study covers far more than anyone’s lived experience.</p>
<p>From the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
He had some info about cross-admits, since he was looking at data for 30 selective colleges:
<p>Harvard did some number crunching on this when I was a student (~12 years ago). Primary legacies are the only ones Harvard counts. As I recall, the legacy admit rate was indeed very high, about 3 times the background rate. But it was only a few percentage points higher than the admit rate for Yale and Princeton legacies who applied to Harvard. In other words, most of the apparent legacy admissions boost is attributable to the kind of applicants HYP parents produce, rather than a special leg up given to Harvard legacies. Whether it’s nature or nurture or a combination, the offspring of HYP grads look really different from the overall applicant pool.</p>
<p>As JHS notes, HYP are in a really different recruiting position from, say, Haverford or Vanderbilt. I’m not sure it’s useful to mix data from such a diverse group of schools, even if it makes the data set bigger.</p>
<p>Speaking as a college counselor and sometime Harvard interviewer, I would put exponentially higher odds of Harvard admission on a black male non-legacy with 650/650/3.7 than a white male legacy with those numbers. If the white male legacy were my client, I’d likely advise him to go ED elsewhere.</p>
<p>Heh. DS is a “primary legacy” for Harvard, but he didn’t even bother applying there. (a) Too expensive; we can’t afford it, and we don’t qualify for that special Harvard need-based thingy. (b) Not all it’s cracked up to be. (DH’s personal experience.)</p>
<p>But, hey, if we’d known about that supposed 45% favoritism-factor… ;)</p>
<p>“You really need a situation where the legacy candidate would not have been admitted but for the legacy tip to really prove your point.”</p>
<p>As a non-resident tutor at Leverett House, DH definitely had a few students who never should have been admitted to Harvard. Several were athletes, but several others were probably legacies; dunno for sure.</p>
<p>Thank you, Hanna, for confirming something I have reported third-hand (and also for indicating that it may be more out-of-date than I thought – I heard about that four years ago).</p>
<p>Calreader – if Brown and Princeton both have legacy admission rates well below 45%, before controlling for anything, then (a) I promise you Harvard, Yale, and Stanford do not have meaningfully higher legacy admission rates, and (b) how the heck can data drawn from 133,000 applications or 1,330,000 applications possibly show that the legacy admissions rates at such schools are 45 percentage points higher than any base rate, since base rates can’t be zero or lower? At least based on the report in the Chronicle, that’s what the study claims: not that legacies are admitted at 145% of the rate of equivalent non-legacies (a proposition not grossly inconsistent with my lived experience), but that legacy admission rates equal the background rates plus an average of 45 percentage points.</p>
<p>Well d was a double legacy at a top ten college. SHe had act score within the range, GPA over 4.OO weighted, and only slightly under not weighted (3.95???). SHe had excellent recommendations including one from a teacher who is an alumna too. SHe had very solid ECs though nothing spectacular. IF there was a legacy advantage, she is the type of kid who would get it. She has been deferred. Now why was this? I think some of it may have been due to her supplemental essay where she clearly identified herself as a Christian. It may have been due to her career aspirations which this particular university might consider too pedestrian (although they do have a prominent law school, but after all she isn’t interested in constitutional law but rather prosecutorial). It may have been due to where we live- suburban DC- which was an advantage for me when I applied back in the early 80’s but probably is a disadvantage now. For all I know, the person doing the first read of the application might have been anti-military. Who knows? She is deferred and probably won;t attend even if she is accepted in April.</p>
<p>Again, how can this possibly be true? As far as I know NONE of the colleges with an average base acceptance rate below 10% admits anything close to 61% of legacies (and only a handful consider anything but the child of a college alumnus/a a legacy).</p>
<p>“it may be more out-of-date than I thought – I heard about that four years ago”</p>
<p>Harvard or one of its peers may well have studied this more recently. I just haven’t gotten this info firsthand in about twelve years, so I thought I should report it with that disclaimer. I would not be surprised if they measure this regularly. It’s a good way of keeping tabs on the true impact of the legacy edge. YP legacies applying to H (and vice versa) are a real control group.</p>
<p>MilitaryMom, the applicant pool for really selective colleges includes some pretty remarkable students, which makes it hard for students with “nothing spectacular” activities to stand out. That’s far more likely to be the issue than bias based on a student’s membership in the majority religious group in the U.S.</p>
<p>JHS - I get what you’re saying about the numbers. Maybe when they talk about the legacy impact “mattering most,” they’re talking about it as a multiplier of the admit rate. The increase of 45 percentage points must be averaged across all 30 schools in the study. Nope, that isn’t consistent with the quoted statement either. I don’t know.</p>
<p>Here’s something about Princeton from Inside Higher Ed - it references the higher legacy admit rate I was remembering:
<p>Re # 17: What’s weird is that the methodology of the study really flies in the face of that. From the actual Chronicle article, it looks like what Hurwitz did was to track legacies’ applications to all colleges, so that he was comparing admissions results for exactly the same student, with the same or equivalent essays and identical recommendations, ECs, etc. So if what you and I believe the Harvard numbers show is correct, then there should only have been a couple percentage points advantage to legacy status, not a couple-couple-dozen.</p>
<p>I note that whatever number-crunching Harvard did would have had to be based only on “primary” legacy, since that’s the only information about Yale/Princeton legacies that would have been available to Harvard based on its application.</p>