Higher Education's Biggest Scam Is Legacy Admissions Policies

[DeepBlue86]

Not so far as I know,@Sue22, and this is my main beef with the Hurwitz study that people here like to cite, which purported to show that that legacies were much more likely to be admitted to the legacy school than peer schools - it didn’t distinguish among different kinds of legacies, and had two major correlation-causation issues. As I said on another thread:

As far as I can tell, at the elites, legacy in isolation does nothing except give the college some comfort that if offered, the student will probably matriculate, thus marginally boosting yield. Of course, if the student applies ED, they have to matriculate if offered anyway, so legacy alone really adds nothing in that case (which is one reason why the elites reject substantial majorities of their legacy applicants). It seems to me that legacy plus non-monetary involvement is likely to be a little better, legacy plus a more-than-modest giving history better still, legacy with big donations much more meaningful, legacy plus celebrity connections and/or real development potential a big boost.

There are two related correlation-causation issues here, though:

First, the legacy applicant’s family is involved and gives because they have ties to the college - they would be much less inclined to do so otherwise (if you went to Brown, you’re a lot more likely to volunteer for and donate to Brown than, say, Dartmouth). Big donations are good in themselves, and also generally come with a full-paying applicant. I would suggest that the involvement/financial aspect is more important than the fact of the legacy itself, but the involvement/donations probably wouldn’t be there if the parent hadn’t attended the school and therefore the applicant weren’t a legacy.

Second…legacies skew higher-SES, which means their families are more likely to have given their kids the tools to produce competitive applications (as well as make big donations as noted above). Similarly to the issue in the previous paragraph, this was probably more helpful to the applicant than the fact of the legacy itself, but was more likely to be present in the first place because the applicant was a legacy.

One could also note, as you allude to above, that a legacy who’s double-hooked in another way can be a compelling applicant. If they’re recruitable as an athlete (sometimes for “rich-kid sports”, but occasionally because they’re high-stats and pull up the Academic Index of the teameven if they ride the bench) or if they’re a URM (there are more and more legacy URMs nowadays) they’ll often get a very good look.