<p>@Jym: I see that PG has just given the numbers, but here is how you could derive the result. Let w represent the fraction of applicants who are legacies. The remaining 1-w are non-legacies. The overall acceptance rate is (0.3)w + (0.07)(1-w) since legacies have an acceptance probability of 0.3 while non-legacies have a probability of 0.07. Since the overall acceptance rate is 0.079, we must have (0.3)w + (0.07)(1-w) = 0.079. Multiplying through and transposing terms, we have (0.3)w - (0.07)w = 0.079 - 0.07 or (0.23)w = 0.009. Dividing through, we get w = 0.009/0.23 = 0.039. Thus, legacies must be 3.9% of the pool.</p>
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<p>Then they are certainly free to express that displeasure by not applying there or having their child apply there, if they dislike the policy so much. If this damages a school so badly by all those undeserving legacies taking up the spots of the best and brightest, then why would you want to go there, and why wouldn’t you want to go to the place where the best and brightest DO go? Oh wait, where do the best and brightest go again …</p>
<p>IIRC, Caltech does not give advantage to legacies. I thought Chicago didn’t (or at least they used to not to), but I might be mistaken there. So … apply there if you think the student body is better / smarter!</p>
<p>Like blossom, I could also write a few chapters about legacy admissions and denials at Brown. But my stories are very different than hers.</p>
<p>Every legacy I know who got into Brown has “normal” parents – successful, but not superstars. Lawyers, consultants, engineers, doctors, writers. One is a minister. Another is a high school teacher. All these kids were high-scoring with fabulous ECs. None of them are multi-millionaires who have donated tons of money. Oops, take that back – I do know of one case of a wealthy donor legacy family whose kids got in. </p>
<p>About 10% of each class at Brown tends to be legacy. I know that for the seniors graduating this year, that percentage is significantly less.</p>
<p>Of course, I also know many high-scoring high-ranked very active legacy kids who did not get in. I know a number of legacy families where one kid got into Brown and the other one didn’t.</p>
<p>I want to comment on something said very early on:</p>
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<p>There is this perception that legacy students are not hard-working or high-achieving. Almost every legacy admit I know from Brown (and I know plenty) worked exceedingly hard in high school, and was very high achieving. (The only exception was a B- average legacy who was a recruited athlete.)</p>
<p>Maybe it has been stated before, but just because Harvard’s admit rate is 7%, it doesn’t every applicant’s chance of getting into Harvard is 7%. A student with 1800 SAT and 3.25 GPA probably has 0% chance of getting into Harvard ( I bet you there are plenty of those applicants). A student with 2300 SAT 4.25 GPA, class president and editor of school newspaper, probably has 70+% chance of getting into into Harvard. I would have to think Harvard graduates’ kids stats are probably above average, therefore their chance of getting into Harvard is higher than 7% just based on their stats. Just because Harvard legacies admit rate is 30% doesn’t really mean they have unfair advantage, it could just mean they have better stats.</p>
<p>I agree with oldfort. I know a bunch of both Yale and Harvard alumni and most of their kids, albeit bright and accomplished, didn’t apply to Harvard because the parents were very realistic about their chances. </p>
<p>Also, the legacy pool is probably lower than 4% because the yield on legacies is likely higher, so you don’t have to admit as many of them relative to non-legacies.</p>
<p>There’s an older thread which puts the Princeton legacy acceptance rate at 41% in 2009.</p>
<p>oldfort, that’s true, but Harvard acknowledges that it does give a legacy advantage. The only thing that’s open to debate is the impact of the advantage – in other words, without it, would the legacy admit rate be 29%, or more like 15%? Based on the latest article, we don’t know.</p>
<p>As an admissions office employee, I was told way back in the day (98/99) that the legacy admit rate was only a few percentage points higher than the admit rate for Y/P legacies who applied to Harvard, which is an excellent control population for comparison. But that’s a long while ago, now, and I never had the actual data even back then. Numbers may have shifted around quite a bit.</p>
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<p>MIT legacy “preference” in fact consists only of one extra review for rejected applications, very rarely changing the outcome of the process.</p>
<p>On the other hand Princeton indeed has 40% and Dartmouth 34%.</p>
<p><a href=“Top Colleges Mum on Legacy Admissions - ABC News”>http://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=4626882&page=1</a></p>
<p>Yale class has a same composition of 13% - 16% of the freshman class for the last 10 years, so presumably have a legacy acceptance rate similar to Harvard.</p>
<p>Stanford class of 2013 has 40% legacies and presumably legacy acceptance rate of 40%</p>
<p><a href="http://www..com/thread.php?thread_id=1154090&mc=5&forum_id=1%5B/url%5D">http://www..com/thread.php?thread_id=1154090&mc=5&forum_id=1</a></p>
<p>So For the HMSPY</p>
<p>University Legacy Acceptance Rate - % of freshman class
Stanford 40%+ - 20%
Princeton 40% - 14%
Yale 34% - 16%
Harvard 30% - 13%
MIT - an extra review of the rejected pile</p>
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<p>I can’t follow the one link you provided. But based on what you said above, that doesn’t mean that MIT doesn’t admit legacies at a higher rate. It merely means that those who are rejected get an extra eye before final rejection. It says nothing about the rate of rejection. </p>
<p>But what does it matter? There is not a single thing that isn’t practically perfect about MIT, or so I’m told.</p>
<p>^^^: I got a warning last time to try to put the link fooling the auto blocker so won’t try to do that this time but if you search you should be able to find the proof that MIT indeed doesn’t give any preference to legacy over an extra review and the acceptance rate of legacies is similar to that of normal acceptance.</p>
<p>See the problem is when the normal rate is 7% and legacy rate is 30% - 40%. The advantage is enormous. It’s like a SAT1 score of 2100 getting an acceptance rate of 2400.</p>
<p>^^^: There was a mistake in my quote. I wanted to list that the posted link actually showed that</p>
<p>“Stanford class of 2013 has 20% legacies and presumably legacy acceptance rate of 40%.”</p>
<p>If 20% of class consists of legacies then legacy acceptance rate of 40% is actually low.</p>
<p>POIH, I can’t figure out your link but the MIT admissions blog says the same thing, no legacy preference.</p>
<p>[MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “Double legacy”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/double_legacy.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/double_legacy.shtml)</p>
<p>Having said that - that doesn’t mean that if you isolated MIT legacies in the applicant pool, that their admit rate might not be considerably higher than the non-MIT legacies in the applicant pool. Which gets to, again … You would expect a pool of MIT legacies to be brighter than average, more well-to-do than average, and likely more intellectually curious than average, which might account for a higher admit rate.</p>
<p>^^^: True I won’t deny that there might 2% to 3% leg up for a well qualified legacy at MIT. </p>
<p>But a 5 to 6 times advantage is insane. You can’t claim to maintain the same standard if the advantage is 5 to 6 times. It’s similar to URM or even worse.</p>
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<p>You can’t calculate that unless you know the % of the applicant pool that is legacy.</p>
<p>IOW, if Stanford’s applicant pool is “thick” with legacies, they don’t need a 40% legacy acceptance rate to wind up with a class that is 20% legacy. In point of fact, if their pool was “thick enough,” a legacy acceptance rate could actually be below that of non-legacies yet legacies could still be a substantial part of the class. </p>
<p>If I had to guess, I would guess that of HYPSM, Stanford and Princeton would have the “thickest” applicant pools with legacy and MIT the least, but that is conjecture on my part. Harvard and Yale seem to attract enough hail-mary-passes that their applicant pool may be diluted in terms of legacy. But I could certainly be wrong.</p>
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<p>But this gets back to … you don’t know that the advantage is really that large (i.e., 7% vs 30% in the Harvard example). It may be that if you omitted mention of legacy status, the Harvard legacies would <em>naturally</em> have had an acceptance rate of, let’s say 25%, and any legacy bump took it from 25% to 30%. You cannot assume that the Harvard legacies taken as a whole would have naturally only had a 7% acceptance rate and that the legacy bump took it up fourfold. Like the MIT legacies, one would expect Harvard legacy kids to be smarter than average, wealthier than average, and more sophisticated than average.</p>
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<p>You can compare the MIT legacies to girls admission the acceptance rate of which is around 14% compare to 9% and if you take the strength of the girls pool and compare with equal boys pool the acceptance rate of such boys pool will be around 12%. So there will be an advantage of around 2%.</p>
<p>I can see a similar advantage for a MIT legacy.</p>
<p>But HSPY case is different because even if you take the strength of the legacy pool the normal equivalent pool of students will have an acceptance rate of 12% instead of 7%. So instead of that the legacies have an acceptance rate of > 30%.</p>
<p>Which is certainly an insane amount of advantage even taking into account the strength of the legacies students.</p>
<p>I founds this quote fromt the Harvard Crimson’s article interesting
Perhaps one can infer that the schools that have a very low legacy admnit rate do so because their alums are less generous with donations, and legacy admits don’t help the bottom line much.</p>
<p>I’m sure this point has been made repeatedly, but I’m sure the high admit rate starts with the self-selection process. My double-legacy kid didn’t apply. Few of my classmates’ kids have applied, even when they have grades/scores that put them into the “qualified” pile. </p>
<p>From participating in alumni interviewing or chatting with others who do, keeping an eye on the alumni magazine, or other ways of maintaining awareness of the current admissions picture, we have a pretty realistic idea of what it takes to get admitted. </p>
<p>On top of that, we are realistic about what the Harvard experience might be like for our kids, and whether or not it’s a good fit. In the case of my kid, we didn’t think it would be, even if she were to be accepted.</p>
<p>So there’s one removed from the denominator.</p>
<p>I also know that my classmates are paying attention early to financial matters, make use of available tools to figure out what Harvard would be likely to cost, and know whether or not they can/are willing to pay for it. If not, their kids don’t apply.</p>
<p>I imagine they are also less likely to lump “the Ivies” into one big pile and “apply to all the Ivies” via common app. Do Dartmouth and Harvard have anything in common besides playing in the same sports conference?</p>
<p>Who knows how many fewer applications Harvard would receive if every kid who had no chance of admission, wouldn’t be happy there anyway, couldn’t swing it financially, or really wanted to be in a rural location, pulled himself out of the running and never applied in the first place? Maybe the overall admit rate would be back up and the legacy bump would appear less significant.</p>
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<p>I’m not following your logic. I don’t know what difference there is (if any) between the strength of the girls’ pool and the strength of the boys’ pool at MIT and why you can extrapolate that the same quality difference applies to legacies vs non-legacies. Moreover, though, MIT likely has an unstated agenda to try to keep the boy / girl ratio close – girls being a bit more of a “rarity”. There’s no such agenda to get a given legacy / non-legacy ratio.</p>