<p>Hey my friend's parents both went to Yale and it got me thinking...does being a legacy help you get into prestigious college like Yale? Or does it not help that much?</p>
<p>Lots of debate over this. Please do a search for “legacy” as a thread title in the Yale forum. No one questions that it helps a lot if the parents are major donors (several million+ dollars). For your typical legacy, there is much disagreement. Many point to the fact that legacies are admitted at a higher rate than non-legacy applicants as proof that legacies get a big leg up. Others say that the higher admit rate merely reflects a child with strong genes who has been raised in a household where education is highly valued and where parents are likely to be savvy about college admissions. The argument goes (and I agree with it) that kids with Princeton, Havard, etc. parents would do just as well with Yale admissions because of their nature and nuture. I have linked in the past to an interview with President Levin who says that legacies have HIGHER metrics than the overall applicant pool. Briefly, those are the two sides of the coin with people holding both beliefs firmly entrenched in their positions.</p>
<p>From my anecdotal experience over decades, I’ve seen A LOT of strong legacy applicants be denied (think 3.9+ GPAs, 2200+ SATs, strong ECs but nothing national level). These kids end up at USNWR top 10 LACs and national universities ranked 5-15 by USNWR (heck, some get into HPS), so they are obviously very viable candidates. In my experience, legacies have to rock just as hard as everyone else and get no real advantage unless beaucoup bucks are involved.</p>
<p>I think it helps A LOT.</p>
<p>And I’m a leggy!</p>
<p>eating food, your success in no way helps the OP, dontcha think? For instance, your metrics made you viable at a wide variety of schools (which you rejected for Y). What if you hadn’t been a legacy? Seems you still may have gotten in to Y, no?</p>
<p>My more limited observations match those of admissions addict - and I can report that legacy D was denied at Yale and will be attending a “top 2” u. So you never know. Legacy applications are carefully (I assume) rejected at Y all the time. It looks to me like institutional needs are the deciding factor and no one outside the committee room can guess as to what those might be.</p>
<p>Also, the sheer number of legacy children is much higher than before. From what I understand, legacy apps that don’t seem likely to be considered get an extra read – just in case.</p>
<p>Plus, Yale has sent letters to alums with kids of applying age to warn them of the realities of the low overall admissions rate – to not get hopes up. Damage control.</p>
<p>Ok. I wasn’t saying that my success meant that the OP would have success. My two sentences were meant to be taken as separate statements.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m from the DC metro area - also known as the Ivy-legacy breeding ground (ivy league grads seem to loooovee Washington). That means that at my school, there are TONS of HYP legacies with whom I’ve grown up. What I’ve found is: historically, all of the legacies have been accepted to their respective legacy institution (while ALWAYS being denied or waitlisted at similarly tiered and lower ranked schools*). In many cases, these legacy students are extremely bright, but are nowhere near as crazy-qualified as some of the other kids at my school who are ultimately rejected.</p>
<p>Also, we organized an admit event for SCEA Yalie admits in the DC area for which we had a turnout of about 20 kids. Literally 80% (16 out of the 20 kids) were legacies. I know those statistics aren’t the best to go by because there are inherent flaws with that measure, but I think that they’re at least something to consider.</p>
<ul>
<li>Here are the results of some of the legacy kids from my school/area:</li>
</ul>
<p>Double Legacy @ Harvard (1): Accepted by Harvard; waitlisted Penn, rejected from Princeton, Columbia, Stanford.</p>
<p>Double Legacy @ Haravrd (2): Accepted by Harvard; rejected from literally every other Ivy</p>
<p>Legacy @ Yale: Accepted by Yale; waitlisted by Harvard, rejected Dartmouth</p>
<p>Legacy @ Penn: Accepted by Penn; waitlisted by Princeton, rejected Columbia.</p>
<p>Basically, I do think legacy helps. I think it’s less about how much money your family donates and more about yield. I mean, I’m not gonna lie, part of the reason I chose Yale because I thought it was cool that my dad went there (and other kids have told me the same thing!). </p>
<p>But that’s just the input of a young, impressionable COLLEGE FRESHMAN (I love saying that!).</p>
<p>Eating food, your results are different than what I see in my area. There are legacies that get in early, but legacies in my region who are accepted tend to be deferred EA and accepted in the regular round. My take is that Yale uses EA as an enrollment tool and since legacies are likelier than any other group to enroll if accepted, why waste EA acceptances on them?</p>
<p>i don’t care what anyone says, being a legacy helps A LOT. if you have the scores and a few ecs to show that you are competent, then you shouldn’t have a problem. i dont know any legacy kid who hasn’t been admitted to HYP…but thats just me. xD good luck!</p>
<p>My son was also a double legacy, and was admitted SCEA. He had some very good things on his application, but he also had quite a few Bs on his transcript. I think it’s likely being a legacy helped, but I can’t say for sure, since he withdrew all his other apps before hearing from them.</p>
<p>well, from what i’ve seen SCEA is a useful way to scoop them all up early… and scoop they do. i’ve never personally seen a legacy from my region disappointed by SCEA results, and they’re generally the only ones who get in, early or otherwise, often over plenty of other more qualified candidates. sort of sad</p>
<p>Wow, I’m not sure exactly where you guys live, but where I’m from most legacies I know get rejected. The admission rate for legacies is somewhere around 20%, which, while higher than normal, is very far from 100%. I do think legacies get a “bump” – I know cases in which legacies and non-legacies with similar credentials apply to the same school, and the former get in while the latter don’t. But it’s not enough at Yale to be a legacy with good grades and ok ECs – unless there’s a wing of Sterling named after your family.</p>
<p>Boy, results sure seem to differ depending on where you live. We’re not in a part of the country that’s crawling with HYP legacies, but all the Yale legacies we know who have applied to Yale in the last several years have been denied. Around here, the few kids who are accepted to HYP are either accomplished students without genune hooks or recruited athletes.</p>
<p>At our public high school, what seems to matter more than legacy is our school’s track record with the individual ivys. Certain ivys ‘like’ our students more than others, and they also tend to ‘like’ particular qualities. Legacy hasn’t trumped these other factors.</p>
<p>If you were to correlate the legacies with donations, I’d bet you see a moderately strong overlap. </p>
<p>One reason legacies get in would be genetics and environment, that the kid grew up in a smart, educationally motivated household. We’d like to believe that’s the main factor, but … if you look at the profile of Yale graduates, they tend to be richer going into Yale and they tend to do well so they may donate.</p>
<p>Obviously I’m just speculating, but I do think legacies help. Some may help more than others, but all in all, I believe a legacy applicant does receive a boost. This year at my school (Top 50 Newsweek public), of all the highly statistically qualified applicants (and there were certainly some who felt snubbed), the only students accepted to H Y or P were legacies. Maybe it’s not a huge boost, but instead more of a tipping factor. Either way, I think it helps.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think that a lot of legacies would get in even without the legacy status. Smart parents tend to make smart babies.</p>
<p>But it’s definitely a considered factor in the admissions process. Emphasis on “considered,” not “very important.” Quote from a Yale info session: “Legacy status can heal the sick, but it can’t raise the dead.”</p>
<p>I think some of the people here have a very distorted view of the world. Because of my age, my profession, and my alumni status, I know a LOT of legacy kids applying to Yale. The admission rate is about 25%. I haven’t seen a single kid I would consider a marginal candidate accepted (and I have seen lots of non-marginal candidates rejected). I have seen a legacy get rejected and accepted at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford. I have seen a legacy get rejected and offered a super-prestigious full-ride scholarship at a famous state university (OOS). I have seen legacies get rejected and classmates who are arguably less distinguished accepted.</p>
<p>By the way, I would say the same thing about Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. A few years ago, a high-ranking Harvard admissions person told a friend (holder of two Harvard magna degrees, and married to the holder of two Harvard magna degrees, whose qualified-but-not-superexceptional daughter had just been rejected) that Harvard’s admission rate for Harvard legacies was only a couple of percentage points higher than its admission rate for Yale and Princeton legacies. In other words, the children of highly educated parents often wind up being impressive candidates for admission, and it’s hard to untangle any legacy preference from that.</p>
<p>A number of the accepted legacies I know were deferred EA and then accepted – that’s a pretty common pattern. But I also know two legacies who were accepted EA. Each was the clear top student in his or her class at a famous high school.</p>
<p>I always wonder how the admission stats at top schools are affected by the number of people who apply who really and truly have no hope of admissions, but do so anyway out of a vain hope, or just for the heck of it. I also wonder whether being a legacy might make such a no-hope candidate MORE likely to apply to the particular school. So, I think, while those legacies who are accepted may be about as qualified as the accepted kids in the non-legacy pool, those that are rejected may be, as a group, less qualified than the regular pool.</p>
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<p>I always do too. Of course, the party line that admissions tend to give is: “almost all of those who are apply are qualified”…which could mean simply that they are going to graduate from high school and occupy a warm body.</p>