<p>The rates at which legacy students are admitted to highly selective colleges/universities has been hotly contested on this board. Thought some of you might find this interesting, from today's Crimson:</p>
<p>Harvards acceptance rate for legacies has hovered around 30 percentmore than four times the regular admission ratein recent admissions cycles, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons 67 told The Crimson in an interview this week.</p>
<p>“Very few who apply have no chance of getting in.” LOL!</p>
<p>What is interesting is that even as the overall admit rate has gone down, the legacy admit rate has remained flat. So on a relative basis, it has gotten EASIER for a legacy to be admitted.</p>
<p>(Can’t say that, if I ran H.'s admissions, I’d do it any easier. Since virtually all the applicants can do the work, why admit more Pell Grant students when you can admit those with money? The Pell Grant students who are Harvard material will get a good education elsewhere anyway, whereas the legacies can’t continue the family tradition anywhere else.)</p>
<p>What I would like to see is the average SAT score of the legacies and that of the college. The ones I have seen in the past have seen that legacies definitely get a break The accept rate in itself is not telling, as I would expect those children who have had the advantage of a Harvard grad parent to be in the upper echelons academically, as such parents will likely be very education oriented. The genetics also are to those kids’ advantages. So unless some reverse discrimination is practiced, there should be more such kids as they will be more inclined to apply there, and certainly have a good chance of being qualified for acceptance.</p>
<p>Also would be interested in MIT’s figures as they adamantly deny giving legacies any edge in admissions. Even without an overt edge, the alumni’s kids have an advantage. My MIT friends have taken their kids to reunions, and have worked with them to the very goal of getting into a school like MIT over their entire lives.</p>
<p>mini, why do you assume that all Harvard grads “have money?” Many do. But as you know, many who attend Harvard do so on financial aid. Their children are ALSO legacies.</p>
<p>I didn’t attend Harvard UG myself. I do have a graduate degree from Harvard. But my children, were they to apply (they didn’t) to Harvard, are eligible for financial aid.</p>
<p>Harvard is pretty generous when it comes to financial aid and meets 100% of need.</p>
<p>I understand the comment by Fitzsimmons that:
"“Very few who apply have no chance of getting in.” in referring to children of legacies. </p>
<p>There are students (doubtful they are legacies) who send an application to Harvard who have NO chance of getting in and who are very unrealistic about their odds when deciding to apply. I see this right here on CC and in my line of work as a college counselor. There are some students and parents who are extremely unrealistic about their student’s odds at certain colleges and they apply to colleges that are “Out of Reach” where they have NO chance to get in. I don’t mean that the school merely has a very low admit rate making it very chancy for any applicant (even the most qualified ones), but these applicants don’t have qualifications remotely in the ballpark to be considered at Harvard. I think Fitzsimmons meant that a legacy applicant would at least have some realistic notions of the kind of profile that would at least be on the “consideration” pile in the Harvard admissions office. There are some other applicants who apply to college who are very uninformed and unrealistic about college admissions to elite universities and apply to colleges very much out of their range.</p>
<p>Your kids, Soozie, would not be considered alums. The accept figure would be even greater if such kids were included. Right now only Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduate alums are considered legacies. A law degree, a masters, a PHD, medical school, MBA don’t count. Nor do grandparents and other relatives having gone there. With 30% just from that pool, it’s amazing how many have a familial connection to Harvard.</p>
<p>Also most Harvard grads with college aged kids “have money” in terms of being well over the average income in the US and over the mid 50% range. Being eligible for financial aid does not make one poor. For a realistic look of the % of kids who are truly needy look at the PELL eligible percentages. They are in single percent figures.</p>
<p>Why does everybody assume that a 30% admit rate for Harvard legacies is high? It might be low, depending on the qualifications of the applicants. Note that Harvard is rejecting 70% of legacy applicants. It could be that Harvard could easily fill half its class with highly qualified legacies, but doesn’t do so because it would look bad.</p>
<p>I would also add that it may be that one reason legacies do well in admissions is that those families know how to manage the application process. It would be interesting to see how well Harvard legacies do at obtaining admissions to other selective schools.</p>
<p>Well, it isn’t high in itself, as I stated. But given the advantages most kids of Harvard grads have, given the profiles of the vast majority of Harvard grads, why should they be given ANY legacy preferences? They are given more than an “all things equal” tip, even without other advantages that some such applicants have in areas like celebrity, development tags.</p>
<p>It is sad to think of the number of spots left for those hook-less hardworking high achieving high school students such as my son and his close friends. While he is not interested in Harvard (but in several other Ivy schools), after considering the legacies, URM, first generation, and athletes, the chances for the hook-less student to get in are much lower than the published acceptance rate.</p>
<p>cptofthehouse, I am well aware that my children would not be considered legacy applicants to Harvard! I was giving an example of someone with an “elite” education who could conceivably be a legacy and yet doesn’t “have money” in the way that mini describes (about why not accept Harvard legacies as they have money…meaning they are full pay). Many Harvard grads have kids who are legacies and yet they are also financial aid applicants. Not all grads from elite schools are rich and full pay is my point. It is not “Harvard grad/legacy = full pay” vs. Pell grant applicants. Very simplistic notion in my view. </p>
<p>And yes, being eligible for financial aid does not make one poor. Never meant to imply that at all. Simply, being a legacy doesn’t mean you are rich.</p>
<p>By the way, if I had a child applying to Harvard right now, given our current income, I think they would be eligible for nearly a full ride given how financial aid has been revised at such colleges since my kids were applicants. And my husband and I have advanced degrees.</p>
<p>I don’t know about Harvard, but Yale has said that its legacies have higher SATs than non-legacies, and receive higher college GPAs. Of course, that’s probably a little jimmied, because the non-legacy pool includes most of the recruited athletes and equivalent people admitted for some superior talent not reflected in SAT scores or college GPAs.</p>
<p>One thing I have heard from Harvard, from multiple sources, is that the admission rate for Harvard legacies is only slightly higher than the admission rate for Yale and Princeton legacies (who of course receive no formal special consideration in the process). In other words, the legacy preference itself matters far less than the factors commonly associated with legacy status that tend to produce good admission candidates: inherited intelligence, educationally-oriented parents, rich learning environment, relative affluence, sophistication about elite colleges.</p>
<p>Re: affluence. Given Harvard’s financial aid policies, many students there who receive financial aid are also, by any objective standard, rich, certainly rich enough not to be exceptions to the general rule that SATs and family wealth are correlated.</p>
<p>Re: Hunt’s point. All the legacies I know in real life who have been accepted at Harvard in recent years were also accepted at several other colleges (e.g., Yale, Stanford, MIT) with similar admissions rates, and where they had no legacy advantage. But from CC I am aware of some legacy acceptees for whom that may not have been the case.</p>
<p>Because they have among the lowest published Pell Grant rates in the nation - under 6%. Because well OVER 30% of those attending are legacies (30% is the admit rate, not the attending rate). Because above and beyond that are the “developmental admits”. Which leaves the remaining 60% of students, a large portion of whom are international students paying full freight, and sons and daughters of Senators, Congresspeople, Ambassadors, and Fortune 500 executives.</p>
<p>It is a myth that H. is generous with financial aid. Absolute myth. They are indeed generous with those they admit who have a need, and they are very careful to make sure there aren’t that many (relatively speaking). (and if I were H., I’d likely run it the same way.)</p>
<p>My guess is that Harvard probably gets more “what the heck” apps from kids who have no chance than any other school. You know, the kind of list that goes “L, M, N, O, P and wth …Harvard”. I call those “flyers”. For the price of an app fee, it’s nice to dream and when they don’t get in, they can always blame it on [take your pick]. ;)</p>
<p>FWIW, Northwestern publicly stated this year in a letter to NU club members that its legacy admit rate is 36%, double the general rate which was 18%. (I may be off a point or two on my numbers, but that’s the general gist.) So the Harvard one of 30% didn’t surprise me at all.</p>
<p>I don’t see what the big deal is. Part of what Harvard aspires to is creating a community and part of that is developing families who are part of that community. Every college tries to do so. Given how high the stats are of the class, there’s little evidence that they are then admitting kids who can’t add 2+2. </p>
<p>And anyway, there would be a point if legacy admit rates were 70%, 80%, 90%. They aren’t. Plenty of extremely well qualified legacies get turned down from these schools every year. It’s no guarantee of anything.</p>
<p>If you want to talk something that’s unfair, let’s talk about the advantage given people who can throw, kick, or hit a ball – which has zip, zero, zilch to do with the function of a university. Until athletics get no special preference (e.g., they are treated just like any other extracurricular activity, instead of Something So Special We Should Recruit For), then spare me the drama on how awful it is that schools have legacy preferences.</p>
<p>JHS, I don’t have the source, but when I saw actual stats some years ago, and they were Yale’s, that was not the case for that given year. There was a definite difference and to the advantage of the legacies. Clearly some of them were getting more than a tip. Perhaps it was because they had other things going for them as well as being legacies, but those numbers were very telling. The same has been so for Princeton, and there was actually a discussion of that a few years ago in an interview with the admissions officer there. I don’t know if that is the case with Harvard. but I can tell you that the Harvard alums accepted at one of my kids’ private school that has a lot of ivy and other selective school bound kids, did have lower stats overall. The extended “Naviance” data showed that very, very clearly. Not saying the kids were not qualified, but when it came to stats, they were not the highest ones and if I had to guess who was going to get accepted blind to legacy status most of them would NOT have made my guess list as they clearly did not show up as the most qualified. This is over a 10 year period, by the way.</p>
<p>I have not looked up the numbers, but I think HPY et al do provide financial aid to around half of their students. Yes, the need provided is generous, and the definition is more generous than most schools. But at least half the kids are not truly wealthy kids. </p>
<p>I also don’t agree with Mini that the schools that are need blind control who they accept with financial need. I believe they give those who are truly needy a bit of an edge too, and that category needs it to even make the 6% point when PELL grant eligible. In the many schools I know, I have not known a single PeLL eligible kid who would be HPY material without a big hook given to that. Oh,I know they exist, but not in the numbers that many think they do. The sad truth is that test scores and academic preparedness are very strongly lined to family income. So without a quarter given to that category, even fewer kids would make up the number.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>30% of the legacy applicants are admitted, but that doesn’t mean that 30% of the admittees are legacies! Where did you get that? I have in my mind that the legacy percentage of the enrolled class tends to be around 15%, but I don’t know why I think that.</p></li>
<li><p>At Harvard, where the difference between admission and enrollment means less than anywhere else, do you really think that accepted legacies enroll at a rate significantly higher than the average? I don’t. If anything, I suspect more than one in five chooses to step out of a parent’s footprints and forge his own path.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Apparently, according to an article, Yale accepted 20% of it’s legacy applicants:</p>
<p>“According to a New York Times story on the event, Brenzel said that Yale rejected 80 percent of its legacy applicants. Brenzel reported that Yale legacies comprise less than 10 percent of the class, according to Kahlenberg.
Brenzel also said that there is a positive correlation between alumni donations and legacy admissions. According to Brenzel, Yale fundraising suffers when fewer legacies are accepted. Still, he said, this year Yale rejected more children of top donors than it accepted.”</p>
<p>Athletes EARN that advantage. A school that wants their boats rowed, their football fields manned, their lacrosse rosters filled, their swim team records respectable need to give some leeway for those that can make it happen. The Ivy League is so formed in terms of Athletics, you know. There are some schools that are finding they don’t want to give athletic preferences and disbanding teams, but that has not happened at Harvard yet. Legacies get their advantage purely by accident of birth. They don’t have to do a thing for than advantage. Big difference.</p>