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<p>If the end result is still a rejection, that’s pretty weak “help.”</p>
<p>I would just like to note that pretty much all the evidence we have as to whether legacy status helps or not is anecdotal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any analysis of legacy vs. non-legacy admissions at top schools corrected for quality of credentials. Levin may be right that at Yale the legacy pool is stronger than the non-legacy pool, but how do the legacies do as compared to similarly strong non-legacies? Who knows? Do schools in fact play games (like deferring legacies to protect RD yield)? Who knows? It seems to me that there is still enough evidence that legacy status helps that people who are legacies should strongly consider applying to those schools.</p>
<p>I don’t live in an area that’s crawling with Yale legacies, but legacy status hasn’t helped the Yale applicants I’ve known. I can think of four Yale alumni kids who applied over the last several years. All applied EA, and all were viable candidates. One was rejected outright, the other three were deferred and eventually rejected. All landed at excellent schools, although none of Y’s peer schools. Around here, the kids who have gotten into Yale have been either recruited athletes or straight-up hookless academic admits.</p>
<p>BC legacy didn’t help me last year. Got me deferred from EA instead of rejected I’m sure, and then an extra line in the rejection letter about my application getting a second look because I was a child of an alumna.</p>
<p>Being a legacy definitely helps at Yale. It’s not a hook. But it most definitely DOES help. It’s just really hard to get into the top schools these days.</p>
<p>Based on my experience, legacy status only helps students that are fully qualified academically. That’s no small thing, given the number of fully qualified applicants that are rejected. </p>
<p>Secondly, legacy status only helps if the relative in question is a parent and, more importantly, a parent that has generously supported the school with their time and money.</p>
<p>You can rarely predict these things. At USC, I knew several kids rejected with equivalent stats, ec, etc who had 3 generations of legacies. Remember Schearzaneger’s daughter rejected from BC and I know low qualified kids taken. Then a good friend told me his cousin was rejected from a medical school just outside Boston one year. His uncle bought a building the next year and he was accepted. My friend said his cousin was not qualified at all (he also went to the same med school.</p>
<p>The problem is that nobody really has enough personal experience to identify a trend. My son is a double legacy at Yale, and he was admitted. Did it help? Hard to say. He had very good credentials. We have donated, but not remotely enough for him to be a developmental admit. He withdrew his other apps, so we don’t know how he would have done at schools where he wasn’t a legacy.</p>
<p>Look at it this way: schools like Yale reject many applicants each year that are highly qualified and could certainly do well at Yale. They also reject applicants like that who are also legacies. If they reject 75% of all highly qualified applicants, and only 70% of highly qualified legacy applicants, then being a legacy helps–but it certainly doesn’t ensure that you’ll get in.</p>
<p>What Hunt describes is what I have seen, in my own family and with the families of my friends. I haven’t seen any legacy kid be admitted, to Yale or any equivalent, who was not absolutely a first-rate candidate. (And many of them have the admissions to non-legacy schools to confirm it, if they were not accepted SCEA.) I have seen lots of legacy kids who were also first-rate candidates NOT be admitted (and many of THEM have non-legacy admissions to confirm it) – significantly more than the ones admitted. Both groups include families that have given hundreds of thousands of dollars and many hours over the years and families that have given hundreds of dollars and minutes, maybe. </p>
<p>To be honest, I believe I have seen a higher proportion of great-candidate legacies be admitted than of great-candidate non-legacies, so I have to agree that legacy status means something. But not very much. If Yale accepts 250 or so legacies each year, I would be surprised if there are as many as 50 of them who would not have been admitted in a legacy-blind system. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were 50 (or more) other kids whose applications get shunted to the Out box because “we’re not taking any more legacies”.</p>
<p>From my HS, legacies to Harvard and Dartmouth (probably five or six total) were admitted last year who were rejected everywhere else (some early at Yale/Stanford) that would remotely compare, i.e. they ended up with safeties and H/D as options and there was not a single cross-admit between H and YPS. Some Stanford and Yale legacies/developmental admits were accepted, but for the most part they were extremely qualified.</p>
<p>I would say it depends on the school and the HS.</p>