@roycroftmom , If you look through a class at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or wherever, you will find a handful of students with backgrounds like you describe, not a significant number. And lots of them are students with actual qualifications we would all accept as “merit.”
Case in point, only as an illustration: One of my roommates at Yale was the son of the mayor of a small city in northwestern Connecticut, a connection that admissions would clearly pay attention to (just as Harvard admissions would notice the child of the mayor of Lowell or Gloucester). He was later Editor in Chief of the Columbia Law Review, a Supreme Court clerk, and a very high-level Justice Department official, positions for which there are no “hooks” unrelated to ability and performance. Do you count him as an illegitimate admit, or as someone who happened to have a hook but would have been admitted in any rational process?
Re Harvard’s “featherweight” legacy preference: The real relevant comparison is not to the average non-legacy applicant, but to the average applicant from families as sophisticated and affluent as the families of Harvard alumni. I haven’t gone over all of the lawsuit discovery data like some of the posters here. For years various people confirmed that Harvard tracked its acceptance rate for Yale and Princeton legacies (who received no preferential consideration in the admissions process) as a sort of control group for measuring the effect of its preferential consideration of Harvard legacies. The difference in admission rate was very small, and not necessarily significant. There was clearly some sort of embedded preference for the children of affluent, educationally sophisticated families, but Harvard legacy status was indeed a featherweight beyond that.