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<p>I could be wrong about this but watching last year’s commencement on live video, I thought it was the oddest ceremony where they celebrate all the past graduates and they show up representing each year as a group and walk in. With that kind of attachment to school and honoring of past graduates, I reckon Brown will be last school in US to eliminate legacy. </p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with honoring and rewarding its past and ensuring a minimum preservation of the same for the future. </p>
<p>TPG, I believe you will be a very active legacy grandpa! </p>
<p>Brown students come from the richest families in the country. It’s an open secret. Financial aid is good there, but the other kids are seriously wealthy. </p>
<p>Btw, today Harvard and Yale play some football. Must be quite a legacy slugfest! </p>
<p>You call that football?</p>
<p>Texaspg, Princeton does something similar - their alumni are really into it. </p>
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<p>I have nothing against it whatsoever. I just think it is hilarious that some students voted in a poll to do away with legacy when Brown has such STRONG alumni honoring traditions.</p>
<p>@xiggi - legacy grandpa sounds good. I am currently trying to promote sibling legacy to whoever wants to listen. :)</p>
<p>Texas, most of those students had not the slightest clue about commencement traditions when they answered the poll. </p>
<p>You’re the first person I’ve heard describe the march as “odd.” And the alums really aren’t being celebrated or honored – we’re welcoming the new grads with open arms, cheers and jeers. Perhaps you didn’t know this, but commencement and reunion happen simultaneously, the same weekend. </p>
<p>I understand that Princeton’s alumni parade is even more rah-rah than Brown. And Princeton’s alumni giving rate is the highest of any Ivy, by far. <a href=“At Princeton, alumni pride aids top rankings - USATODAY.com”>http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-08-20-princeton-rankings_N.htm</a></p>
<p>Considering the fact that Princeton sends a higher percentage of their graduates to the finance industry (instead of, say, non-profit organizations), a higher percentage of them may have access to more financial resources to give it back within a decade after graduation.</p>
<p>It is true that legacy and the idea that your children my go there too is part of the glue that makes Ivy league Alumni groups some of the strongest in the country without amazing sports teams.</p>
<p>@texaspg, I thought you’d love the following from Princeton Reunions: <a href=“https://www.google.com/search?q=P-Rade&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=fN1wVPWsN_SAsQTlooGIAg&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1553&bih=660#tbm=isch&q=P-Rade&imgdii=qN_QHu6hBECTIM%3A%3B03WryE0dbINYIM%3BqN_QHu6hBECTIM%3A”>https://www.google.com/search?q=P-Rade&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=fN1wVPWsN_SAsQTlooGIAg&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1553&bih=660#tbm=isch&q=P-Rade&imgdii=qN_QHu6hBECTIM%3A%3B03WryE0dbINYIM%3BqN_QHu6hBECTIM%3A</a>.</p>
<p>@mcat2, of non-LACs, I believe Princeton has the highest percentage of alumni donations each year. So it is not just the sizes of gifts but the percentage of alumni who give.</p>
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<p>Only because I heard it as ‘regraduating’ ceremony for alums every year. Irrespective of that, what I saw on the video was a pretty strong sentiment that suggests legacy at Brown is not going anywhere.</p>
<p>There are multiple sets of alums. A very tiny group has development cases who donate buildings, another set provides token donations but there is a third set who put in time and effort all year round coordinating visits for adcoms, go to schools with them, arrange local meetings for students, and coordinate interviews. Some of their kids are involved in helping the adcoms and coordinating their visits, events etc. If I were an adcom, I would be hardpressed trying to find a gem in the haystack when I am hanging out with kids all day long who are impressive in their own right. If an adcom hangs out in a region long enough, they might be seeing these kids grow up right in front of them, almost like their own family members.</p>
<p>Legacy preference is a fairly stupid idea, in my opinion.
Why should my college attendance have any bearing on whether you decide to admit my kid?
Nevertheless, I find it hard to empathize much with the Tiger Mom whose kid with the perfect stats has to “settle” for Tufts or the state flagship. I might empathize a little more if it turns out that the Ivies have an actual ceiling on Asian admits … rather than a preference (one that happens to play out statistically in some other groups’ favor) for exceptional ECs and interesting essays over marginally more amazing stats.</p>
<p>Do we know which of the two it really is? If it’s true that the percentage of Asians at these schools has been nearly the same, year after year, that does look like a quota. How exercised should I be about that? It just doesn’t strike me as a terrible social injustice that Harvard wants to favor a legacy with a nearly perfect score over a first gen Asian with an actual perfect score. Especially when there are colleges out there that might be better for some of these kids, and more eager for additional Asian applicants.</p>
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Is there any data showing that, for applicants with mixed races (only one of the races is Asian), the ones whose mother is Asian but whose father is not would do better than the ones whose father is Asian but the mother is not? (There may be so few of the latter. But this is a different topic that is not relevant here.)</p>
<p>At least for the “lower ceiling” criterion like high school’s own academic merit (i.e., GPA or class rank, especially at a non-magnet school), it seems the students with the Asian background spend well too much time on something that is not valued much by the admission officers at Ivy colleges. In DS’s high school class, a non-Asian applicant whose class rank is 18th was admitted to Harvard. He is not a hooked student. All I can say is that he knows where he should spend his time and energy on (EC!) He is still a top student among the students with the same gender and the same ethnic group as his in that year at his high school. Somehow male students (but not the female students), unless they have the Asian background, tend to be not willing to spend too much time on working on their class rank. They are rarely among the top 5 in most years, and in some years not even among the top 10, at DS’s large, semi-competitive public high school. Maybe all good ones were sent to a higher quality prep school?</p>
<p>I also seem to recall seeing somewhere that the admittance rate for legacies of other Ivy schools is similar. So unless you believe that they are also giving equal preference to legacies of other schools (is this good for yield?), it seems the legacy applicant pool is significantly more qualified than the average applicant, If this is true, they can maintain a much higher admit rate for legacies without actually giving significant preference to them and still keep the alums happy thinking they are getting special treatment. </p>
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<p>Probably true that (at Harvard and other highly selective schools) legacies would have a higher admission rate even if legacy status were not considered, since legacies tend to be among the most advantaged of all applicants (well educated parents, probably with high SES). Of course, most of these schools do consider legacy status, but this means that the actual magnitude of legacy consideration is obscured if one looks at simplistic things like admission rates. That is probably just what the schools want – they want the legacies and their parents to believe that there is a large preference for them (to keep the alumni happy and donating), while they want non-legacies and their parents to believe that it is a minimal preference (so that they won’t think it is pointless to apply).</p>
<p>I agree that the legacy applicant pool is significantly more qualified than the average applicant. The question is whether, among the admitted, non-hooked students, the legacy students are more qualified than the non-legacy students.</p>
<p>I suspect that the legacy students win by having more significant ECs, but lose out in the traditional academic merit (esp., the class rank.) Since Ivies (with the exception of few “larger” ones) place so much emphasis on ECs, we can argue that many non-legacy students “bark on the wrong tree” in their efforts on packaging themselves.</p>
<p>Except they don’t even <em>tell</em> the parents / alumni “there is a large preference for your alumni kids.” At least at our school, they’re pretty darn transparent. If someone wants to look at a situation in which the majority of legacies are still rejected and conclude “oh, wow, there’s a large preference for them,” well, then, they’re stupid. </p>
<p>“Is there any data showing that, for applicants with mixed races (only one of the races is Asian), the ones whose mother is Asian but whose father is not would do better than the ones whose father is Asian but the mother is not? (There may be so few of the latter. But this is a different topic that is not relevant here.)”</p>
<p>If a student checks both Caucasian and Asian, how is the school to know which parent is which? I would not consider it a done deal to extrapolate off last names.</p>
<p>Of course, some ECs (e.g. sports needing purchase of expensive equipment not provided by the team, or costs paid to the team to cover expensive equipment, etc.) may be more accessible to high SES families (which probably describes a higher percentage of Harvard legacies than non-legacies).</p>
<p>Those from high SES families may also have lower class rank on average, due to attending more competitive (public or private) high schools than those attended by others.</p>