Harvard Legacy and Z List Questions

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
21

@TiggerDad - if that were true, every unhooked Asian-American kid (and white kid) admitted to the elites would have perfect stats and “great spiky ECs”, and I can assure you that many of them don’t. It’s all about what the adcoms think you’ll contribute at the school and after, as they allocate a finite number of spots among many constituencies.

There are several implicit assumptions in your argument: (i) that it’s possible for adcoms to assign an individual ranking to each applicant by stats and EC spikiness; (ii) that hooked kids would never rank highly by these measures; (iii) that adcoms assign this ranking and use it as a yardstick for admission (in fact, the principal yardstick for the unhooked); (iv) that the applicants at the top by those measures have earned and are owed admission; and (v) that they’re overwhelmingly Asian-American. I don’t believe any of those assumptions is accurate.

What I’m confident is true is that adcoms fill the class by bucket (with which you appear to agree), with probably a little under half the slots going to the unhooked. Most applicants - including most Asian-American applicants - are unhooked. There are far more unhooked kids with stellar stats and spiky ECs than can be admitted. Many - but not nearly all - of these are Asian-American. So, a lot of Asian-Americans (and other kids) with stellar stats and spiky ECs aren’t admitted, and the ones who are admitted get the nod because they’re deemed to be just a little bit better than the ones who don’t, based on their essays, LORs, etc. (which the armchair pundits on CC of course never see, and which many assume - wrongly - don’t count for much).

If there are two applicants with identical super stats and ECs, there’s room for one of them, and the adcoms conclude that one has the personal attributes to found a major company while the other will probably only ever be a strong bench scientist, they’re probably going to pick the first one, whether one, both or neither is Asian-American. It isn’t a racist conspiracy, just about picking the top candidates in each category to fill a limited number of places.

This, by the way, is why I think the lawsuit against Harvard alleging discrimination against Asian-American applicants to the College is going to go nowhere. There won’t be a smoking gun of a memo that says “we’ve hit our Asian limit”, because I’m confident they don’t explicitly screen applicants by race. Instead, they’ll find, among other things, files of admitted Asian-Americans with less-than-perfect stats but with adcom notes that talk about how fabulous the kid is, and files of white kids with better stats who were denied.

Ironically, if the schools were willing to state unapologetically that this how they make the sausage, no one would bother bringing a case. Because the schools won’t acknowledge clearly that stats are more of a filter than a yardstick, and that a lot of other things can be more important once you pass the filter, they end up in court accused of racial discrimination in violating admissions standards that they don’t even use.

22

It’s not even as hierarchical as which might found a company. You can see many Wharton or Stanford wannabes on CC who are enterprising, but still miss the mark. Adcoms tend to look first at the four years on campus.

Nor is it really about spiky. It’s great to find a kid who got excited about something and added successive challenges (meaning responsibilities or impact, even small.) That can show some vision, energy, and willingness. Often, spirit. Those are characteristics, not lines on a resume. But most kids are doing “same old.” A chunk of that is meh, the carpet lad out for them. Even achieving at the highest levels outside class can be meh, ordinary pursuits in a pool of hard working kids.

They’re viewing through the wrong lens. So, they’re pulling together apps with the wrong idea of what truly makes a kid interesting for that college.

23

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the suit against Harvard. Hopefully, some of the data we don’t/can’t see about how preferences work will come to light. It does seem obvious that part of the “holistic” process is to group students of certain characteristics into separate cohorts and compare them against each other (why Asian American admits have higher test scores on average). The schools do not deny, and in fact trumpet their position that they are trying to assemble a diverse (not just race/ethnicity) undergrad body on the basis that this produces a superior learning environment. I for one am grateful for having classmates at Yale and Berkeley Law of hugely divergent backgrounds, opinions and talents and wish the same for my children who both attended large public high schools rather than private schools for this reason. The question before the courts is whether race/ethnicity is a legal cohort to use.

Affirmative action is the topic elsewhere on the site, so getting back to the legacy question. All I can offer is anecdotal observations coupled with some data from which we can make reasonable inferences. I am also assuming H and Y are similar with respect to legacy trends and policies. When I attended Yale in the late 70’s/early 80’s, many of my “legacy” friends freely admitted and even joked about how they got in, sharing their SAT scores over a beer (or 6). No one ever admitted a score below 1200, but there were plenty of 1200’s to 1300’s. Almost all of my “middle class/non legacy” friends were in the 1400’s. To give some context though, the 25% to 75% range in that era was about 1200 to the mid 1400’s (it looks like the College Board changed its scoring calculations in 1995, raising reported scores). More relevant to this discussion, during that era, legacies amounted to 20%± of each class. https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pierson_update_1976-2000.pdf Today legacies represent about 13%. Clearly the standards for legacies have tightened as there are less places for that cohort. We don’t have official data from H or Y, but anecdotally, of my dozen or so classmates that I keep in close contact with, we have 4 kids out of 10 who got admitted. All of them were well within the objective ranges (a few were well north of the “average”, including some very disappointing rejects). While 40% is a great admit rate, we are talking about a subgroup of applicants that were top 5% or better of their class with 1500+ SAT scores (or 32+ACT). In the conversations I had with senior AO’s about my kids, they were very blunt that as legacies, they would be compared against a very high achieving subgroup. In my conversations with my classmates who had kids that applied or were about to apply, we seriously thought being a legacy (especially if you live in a major metropolitan area with a lot of alums) that you might be at a disadvantage!

24

MODERATOR’S NOTE:

Indeed. And since the OP did not ask about about AA, let’s move off the topic, please.

25

A lot has changed, over the decades. I think it pays to remember a lot of statements are relative, not absolute. If Johnny is a top performing legacy, the conversation has only just begun, so to say. He could still be obnoxious, limited, and otherwise flunk the subjective aspects. I believe legacies generally have a better understanding of a college. But not always.

26

The share of legacies has declined as overall competitiveness has increased and new constituencies/priorities have emerged (e.g., first-gens). I believe that the number of legacies is broadly maintained at a level that aims to assure alumni that it provides a significant boost (so that they remain involved and generous) while conveying the impression to the outside world that very few people get in primarily because they’re legacies.

Nowadays, from what I can tell, admitted legacies tend to range from kids that would stand a good chance of being admitted even if they weren’t legacies, to kids whose stats are middle-of-the-pack or near the lower end relative to the admitted cohort but whose family is highly involved/generous. Since 70+% of legacy applicants are denied, very few clearly controversial cases are going to make it through the admissions gauntlet. Bear in mind, too, that many in the latter group probably enjoyed a lot of advantages associated with being high-SES and produced attractive/polished applications.

27

It seems legacy admits rate has always been roughly two and half times regular admit rates. I don’t know if its by coincidence or design.
But another interesting aspect of legacy is whether AOs assign different weight to different types of legacies, ie college vs MS vs PHD vs MD vs JD etc, Does it also depend on the amount of donation to the university? if so would AOs pull out the files on each legacy while reading the student app and see how much the alum donated?

28

If you’re a big enough alum donor that it could offer a tip, that’s not discovered at the last minute, when an adcom opens the file. The mega donors have their own development reps who run some interference- and are tasked with informing the parents if admissions thinks little Bobby or Susie isn’t up to snuff.

Colleges generally state what sorts of legacies matter to them.

29

@DeepBlue86 - “There are several implicit assumptions in your argument: (i) that it’s possible for adcoms to assign an individual ranking to each applicant by stats and EC spikiness; (ii) that hooked kids would never rank highly by these measures; (iii) that adcoms assign this ranking and use it as a yardstick for admission (in fact, the principal yardstick for the unhooked); (iv) that the applicants at the top by those measures have earned and are owed admission; and (v) that they’re overwhelmingly Asian-American. I don’t believe any of those assumptions is accurate.”

I had to read your statements a couple of times because these “implicit assumptions” sounded very foreign to me. I have my own personal opinions about how admissions at elite schools operate, and I only brought up Asian-Americans, not to hijack the thread, but to simply challenge how we define Fitzsimmons’ words, “credentials” and “better candidates.” Those words have a wide range of interpretations, enough to control a certain and consistent year-to-year percentages of each sub-class and over peer institutions, as well. If absolutely blind admissions are practiced, the whole sub-class structure and over peer institutions would exhibit, I’m sure, a very different pattern than what we see today.

Going back to the issue of legacy, I’d just like to add to the current discussion that, legacy now being highly competitive in itself, I believe cross-hooks, i.e., legacy + recruited athelete or URM or development case or celebrity, etc., have a greater advantage over the candidate with a single hook. But what really provides an advantage is by individual case always in relation to the pool.

30

@jzducol if you go to the link I supplied in post #22, you can see that at least during the period from the class of 1979 to 2001, the % of legacy admits based on graduate school affiliation is roughly a fifth to a third of undergrad affiliation for Yale. The data doesn’t show how many of each group applied, so it is hard to deduce an advantage either way. FWIW, Yale undergrads comprised about 50% of the total student population in that era. The definition of what constitutes a legacy also varies by institution, so we know that in those cases an explicit distinction is made.

As to other somewhat related factors, based on conversations with my development officer, the development office will put a note in the applicant’s file if the parents are consistent donors and/or active volunteers. Otherwise, they do not participate in the admissions decisions. What she wouldn’t divulge is if different donor levels got different “notes” (you have to think so). There is also little question that mega donors get personalized attention (see post #27 and the President’s son-in-law!).

31

And certain development cases don’t even have to meet any requirements, either. They just get arrange to attend some other school for a semester or a year and then transfer back to Harvard so that they don’t hurt the incoming class stats.

32

Hmmm… strange… I was responding to jzducol’s comment, and both his and my posts got deleted. In any case, my comment about development cases is from “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” from the Pulitzer winning investigative journalist Daniel Golden. It’s a great book.

33

Oh, the journalist, dating back to 2006 and before. Sorry, I just see these so-called exposes as ventures. They’re interesting, but an outsider’s view. I understand the desire so many have, to get behind the veil.

This OP hasn’t yet shared his stats and more. But often, when there are certain sorts of questions, I wonder how much a kid has truly looked into what the college says it looks for (hints, in some cases,) the values that are apparent,etc. That doesn’t matter for the vast bulk of colleges. But tippy tops an be choosy. OP’s questions and the mention of “gut instincts” does suggest he hasn’t dug into his match. Just the fact of legacy and the desire to lock things up.

34

MODERATOR’S NOTE:

It’s not strange and it’s not a system glitch; you were responding to a post which I deleted that served only to derail the thread. Additionally I deleted back and forth comments about users having read/not read a particular book. Please keep comments on topic.

35

“If you look at the credentials of Harvard alumni and alumnae sons and daughters, they are BETTER candidates on average,” said Fitzsimmons…”

I’m surprised none of the many good statisticians on CC commented on the flaw in this statement.

Being “better candidates on average” doesn’t mean that you are a better candidate than the top 50% of students in the applicant pool. Or a better candidate than the top 25% of applicants. Given an admit rate of under 5%, that doesn’t tell you very much about whether those students are favored.

It would be interesting to compare the average SAT/GPA of admitted legacy students - excluding recruited athletes or URM – with the average SAT/GPA of admitted non-connected students – excluding recruited athletes or URM.

36

Some faulty math since you describe comparing legacies “on average” against a specific subset of others.

“On average” from MacMillans: “used for talking about what is usually true, although it may not be true in every individual situation.
On average, women live between five and seven years longer than men.”

37

@observer12 The legacy advantage was well studied and documented in the 2004 Espenshade paper, and discussed extensively on this forum. By controlling other parameters the authors estimated that the legacy preference was worth 160 points out of 1600 SAT scale, which is roughly one and a half standard deviations.

38

Oh no. Espenshade. Same guy who said don’t lean on my results, we only saw part of the picture.

39

The Espenshade paper, and the Golden book, were based on data and reporting that at this point are 20 years old. I think the Espenshade data is mainly from admissions in the mid-late 90s. That was a very different world: many fewer international applicants, many fewer applicants overall, and many, many fewer legacy applicants. Most of the Ivies expanded their class sizes significantly in the early 1970s when they went co-ed, and the children of those alumni didn’t really start showing up as applicants until the '00s. Also, the number of legacy URMs exploded in the '00s. And I believe the percentage of legacies in a class declined meaningfully, from 15-20% to around 12%.

In my world, I know a ton of Yale legacies, and a good number of Harvard ones. Legacy kids without competitive stats don’t apply. Legacy kids with wonderful stats get rejected. A lot. My extended family is stuffed with Harvard legacies. No one has been accepted at Harvard since 2003. The last relative accepted was also accepted at Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and MIT, with no hooks at any of them, so it’s hard to conclude that her qualifications were questionable at Harvard.

Numerous people, on and off CC, have reported being told by Harvard admissions that they periodically check the Harvard admissions results for Yale and Princeton legacies to understand what kind of advantage they are giving to Harvard legacies – the YP legacies functioning as a kind of control group of applicants who are demographically identical to Harvard legacies but get no special consideration in the admissions process – and the difference in admission rate is not significant. In other words, the rate at which Harvard accepts Harvard legacies is approximately the same rate at which it accepts other (mainly) affluent, sophisticated, genetically favored, domestic applicants who didn’t apply unless they were well-qualified.

40

For the class of 2018 the legacy students scored about 60 points higher on the SAT. Their family income was also a lot higher

http://features.thecrimson.com/2014/freshman-survey/admissions/