<p>Ivy league as sport league; Ideally, if they want to go the route of mind and body thing as in ancient Greece, they shoud have all walk-ons. Impeccable intellect combined with steely descipline of an athelet. Atheletic advantage is a cop-out, a deception, gaming. Sorry there’s nothing honorable. It certainly is not sportsmanship.</p>
<p>It’s been a while since I did a logit, but there are some comments on the comments section towards the end that I want to think about … namely, that it’s not a percentage point increase but an increase against one’s own odds, because you simply can’t have EVERY legacy getting a xx-point percent increase - legacy rates at elite schools would be a heck of a lot higher. Which fits with the common sense that it’s easier to give the tip to the legacy kid who has the smarts in the first place vs to the legacy kid who is on the margin / bubble.</p>
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<p>Legacy applicants have already had that . If they can’t get in on their own merit after being nutured beyond the norm, may I say they are not made of real stuff?</p>
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<p>Had to jump in when I read this.</p>
<p>Pretty much my describes my husband’s story right here. Poor inner city Hispanic goes to Ivy league school. Great success in life. So now his very very qualified sons get a leg up in admissions. I sort of have mixed feelings about the whole thing but his attitude is “all those rich white guys kids get legacy preference now it time for my kids”. I guess it’s all how you look at it.</p>
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I felt sour grapy about MIT for a while when my oldest was rejected, that was somewhat exacerbated by the fact that the head of admissions turned out to have faked her stats and was fired shortly after she rejected my son. :)</p>
<p>That said, the notion that the legacies are lacking irks me no end. For the record, I believe my kid was pretty typical for a legacy.
SAT 800CR/770M, National AP Scholar (all 5s), GPA 103+, top 1% of his class, medals every year at the State Science Olympiad, lots of professional experience in computer science, acknowledged in a scientific paper for his computer programming help. Yada, yada, yada. I think it’s very likely that being a legacy helped him get into Harvard, but there’s no way he wasn’t qualified.</p>
<p>Also based the stats jym626 quoted, S2 has above a 90% chance of being admitted to Princeton. Can he just stop trying now and call it done? :)</p>
<p>I would also note that more of the annoyance should be directed to the hundreds of colleges that really do take unqualified students, by recruiting athletes who can’t make it academically. The Ivies don’t do that.</p>
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<p>Hunt, in my opinion, the letter reflects the inflated sense of entitlement of alums, our previleged minorty. Ivies are simply trying to lower their unattainable expectation not to be burned. Alums are unique among all special interst groups applying to Ivies. I bet URMs don’t demand an admission.</p>
<p>A lot of alums support their universities through giving and volunteerism, and even those who don’t often would like their kids to go to those schools for all sorts of reasons. I think it’s very true that a lot of them may have an inflated view of how much being a legacy might help. Also, a lot of them may have an inaccurate view of how difficult it is, in general, to get into those schools, as compared to how it was when they went. Sending them a letter to manage those expectations is good business.</p>
<p>I’m not aware of any alumni “demanding” admissions for their kids, but I certainly know that they can be disappointed and even angry if their kids don’t get in–especially if their kids are highly qualified. That disappointment certainly costs the Ivies a lot of money in future donations.</p>
<p>As for URMs, they are just about the only people who are frequently told on CC that they will “get in everywhere,” and some of them really do.</p>
<p>Getting angry when not admitted is not too different from demanding. I haven’t heard URms getting angry when denied of an admission.</p>
<p>I’d be rich enough to be an actual donating legacy parent if I had a nickel for every time an ORM on CC got angry when they hear of someone who has lower SAT/scores/rank getting in who happens to be a URM, and they claim that that person “stole their spot” or “their spot was given to …” Someone even said as much upthread. As if ANYONE has ANY rights to any spot anywhere.</p>
<p>And it’s rather interesting to me that the anger gets displaced on the URM kid vs the athlete or the legacy.</p>
<p>Igloo – are you serious? There’s a huge diff between angry and demanding. You can be angry in the privacy of your own home – demanding is when you call the adcom and demand that the decision be changed.</p>
<p>The colleges want to have it both ways. They want the alumni to show loyalty, and to donate money, and to foster that they tell them that there is a legacy “tip.” But they also tell everybody else that the “tip” is not that great.</p>
<p>If they said there was no tip, then they might lose some bucks upfront, and alumni whose kids got rejected might still stop giving. So, from a financial point of view, what they are doing makes sense. After all, I don’t think they are losing too many application fees from people who object to the legacy tip.</p>
<p>Hunt’s completely right, as usual. It is exactly good business to assure the alumni that they love their kids, but that they are going to turn down a good number of them and it’s nothing personal.</p>
<p>What is disturbing about legacy advantage and alums getting angry when it doesn’t go their way is that Ivy alums are supposed to be leaders in our society with intellectual capacity to look beyond their immedaite self interest. Clearly, they can’t. Ivies toot “leadership” in admissions criteria as one of the most important. Yet their grads seem to show leadership mainly in looking out their self interest. That does not bode well for the society. The smartest, the powerful, the wealthiest segment in society are preoccupied with themselves not with the greater good. Is that why we are polarized more than ever?</p>
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LOL I was thinking the same thing!</p>
<p>Igloo,
Why are Ivy alums held to a higher standard? Where is there evident that they are looking out for themselves any more than anyone else is?</p>
<p>If Harvard accepted fewer of the rich well-connected legacies who hire alumni Harvard would be a considerably less desirable place to attend. Leadership has always been to some extent a code word for well-connected. Harvard has changed a lot since Conant started a campaign to turn Harvard into more of research university with a critical mass (but not too many!) bright academic types. That tradition continues, though the number of academic types has increased greatly. I really think the presence of the people for whom Harvard (or insert your favorite Ivy here) is a tradition and those who are first generation is necessary to make it a great school. I don’t know what the magic number of legacies is, but I don’t think it’s too many. I rarely ran into legacies when I was there (1970s) and I believe there are even fewer there now.</p>
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Leadership is important, but I think most people would place a higher value on loyalty to their own children. After all, isn’t that why you are complaining about this?</p>
<p>You’d have a point, Iglooo, if we were talking about the HYP of yore, in which a slap on the back, a handshake and a cigar were enough to get well-connected kids into that elite club, and oh by the way, academics? Why yes, I remember the time I put the frog down my headmaster’s back at Andover, good times.</p>
<p>Anyway … if HYP is still so chock-full of all of those unqualified Thurston Howells, then you couldn’t possibly want your bright kid to hang around all those unsufferables. You’d better figure out where the smart kids go, and send your kid there instead.</p>
<p>These HYPS-bashing threads on CC are getting me all confused. So in the last month I have read strong arguments that:</p>
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<li><p>Attending HYPS (or other top private college) does not confer any advantage over attending a generic state university- no advantage in terms of better education, or in terms of better graduate/professional school admissions, or in terms of future earning ability. Basically, it is a waste of money to pay the tuition for these colleges.</p></li>
<li><p>Legacies, Athletes, and other groups are being unfairly preferred by the top private colleges and this is a major problem, because this gives a tremendous advantage to the admitted students relative to the other kids who have to end up in generic state universities where of course they will receive inferior education and never make as much money as they would have had they only been admitted to the elite private college, thereby perpetuating social injustices.</p></li>
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<p>So which is it? 1 or 2?</p>
<p>vicariousparent, a cynical mind would say that those two seemingly inconsistent arguments are just two different varieties of sour grapes:
2. My kid didn’t get in because the deck was stacked.
- And it’s just as well–he’s better off.</p>
<p>But a less cynical mind would say that both of these, when stated in a less inflammatory way, are sensible questions to ask:
- Is attending HYP worth the cost, especially if the honors college at the state U is free, or almost free?
- How can an individual student measure his odds of admissions when he’s crafting an application strategy?</p>