How far does "legacy" get you?

<p>Also, Senator Kerry and former President Bush's performance at Yale (C's) didn't have the self esteem cushion of grade inflation like we do today.</p>

<p>If you read "The Price of Admission", you will most certainly be disgusted by the favoritism that all elite colleges show towards the children of the politically connected (both parties, too). They are not all top students, either, as Golden documents in great detail.</p>

<p>The children of Sen. Bill Frist (R) and VP Al Gore (D) were among the students profiled at length in "The Price of Admission", and they most certainly were not qualified academically. I believe in Harrison Frist's case, Princeton had to admit every single applicant from his high school class (six in all) that was ranked above his sorry ass in order to justify his acceptance. Al Gore III was slightly different from Frist in that he already had an arrest record (covered up, of course) in high school. Frist wasn't arrested until he entered college.</p>

<p>Golden's explanation is that schools are trying to curry favor with politicians in order to obtain federal grant money for research and the like, which makes sense. The book is excellent, almost like a modern-day version of "The Jungle" by U. Sinclair.</p>

<p>Imagine yourselves as the President of a major university. You have a chance to admit the child of a powerful Senator, someone who may well be President of the United States one day, and someone whose family has attended and supported your university for several generations. The kid wouldn't get in on his own merits, but is perfectly capable of doing the work. Experience shows that when you do this, at the very least two or three Deserving Poor roommates/friends wind up working for Dad and getting a powerful boost in their careers at the outset, and their class has a high-value Class Day speaker. Often you wind up with a lot more, like a new student center and a 20-year contract to manage a supercollider.</p>

<p>Do you give up a precious slot to Junior? Of course you do. It's a complete no-brainer. You only really see 4-5 such kids per year, it doesn't even make a dent.</p>

<p>I know several people who had no wealth or connections whatsoever whose lives were changed because of their associations with the spawn of the very rich and very powerful in college or law school.</p>

<p>I'll grant you Al Gore III (I actually thought of him as disproving my point while I was typing my post), but suspect Kristin and Karenna were meritorious. I also bet Kerry's daughter Vanessa who went on to Harvard Med School had the goods. </p>

<p>For what it's worth, all the kids of famous people who I knew were very bright. The least impressive one (a senator's son who was initially waitlisted) was garden variety smart kid like you see all over CC. He definitely got boosted because of his father, but he was no slouch. He had great "emotional intelligence", however, and has been very successful in his adult life because of it (and, of course, his connections).</p>

<p>The problems with "Exceptions for Junior" are that:</p>

<p>1) The schools claim that they treat everyone equally</p>

<p>2) The number of "Exceptions for Junior" is much larger than you think</p>

<p>At Harvard, they have a name for this backdoor program: The Z-List. As I recall, this Z-list can be anywhere from 50-100 kids every year. There's a whole chapter in "The Price of Admissions" about the Z-List. Most of the time, the sorry losers on the Z-list are told to take a year off to travel, pursue independent study or ask grandpa to write a bigger check, before enrolling at H.</p>

<p>There are 100 Senators, 435 Congressmen, 9 Supreme Court justices and 500 "Fortune 500" CEOs, not to mention hundreds of ex-CEOs and ex-Members of Congress and their thousands of children and grandchildren.</p>

<p>Do you turn down a potential Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose parents grew up in a remote Asian village so that Albert Gore IV can attend H and then have his family fund the Center for Global Warming Studies? Where does the favoritism end?</p>

<p>There are 350 million people in the United States, and that still only produces <30,000 Yale applications, i.e., 0.008%. A population of 10,000 VIPs (and that's being very generous), plus their families, say 100,000 people, will produce Yale applicants at a somewhat greater rate, but it's still not going to get far out of single digits in any particular year, and some of them may go to Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford.</p>

<p>My class at Yale, in the bad-old, 25%-acceptance-rate days had exactly two politically hooked kids: Ron Reagan and Bobby Shriver (son of Sargent, brother of Maria). BFD. (The only person I knew who was totally miserable at Yale, however, was the grandson of a member of the Yale Corporation. His brother -- the Corp member's namesake -- had been rejected the year before, and no one had told the admissions office that a much smarter #3 grandson was one year away from applying. This guy really couldn't handle the work, and he felt like crap all the time.)</p>

<p>By the way, I suspect that no person identified by the admissions office as "a potential Nobel Prize winning scientist" is denied admission. The thing is, it's pretty hard to identify future Nobel Prize winners at 18. It took my freshman roommate a whole academic year to figure out that real Nobel Prize winners were a little smarter than he.</p>

<p>According to "The Price of Admission", legacy acceptance rates in 2003 at H were 40%, compared 11% overall. About 12-14% of the class is legacy, according to the Crimson. Do the math, and you can see that legacies have admissions rates that are almost 6 times the rate of non-legacies. Do a little more math, and you will find that about 30-40 more legacy students per year get accepted than statistics would predict. Golden cites figures that show legacies GPAs and SATs are slightly lower than the regular non-legacy applicant pool.</p>

<p>The size of the Z-list (80 in 2002) would indicate that about half of z-listers are legacy, and the other half are zillionaire or politicians' kids. Remember, these are students going to H just through the backdoor. How many of them made it through the front door because of their connections and/or wealth?</p>

<p>So, to answer the original question: "How far does legacy get you"? On average, very far, at least in the Ivy League and the schools that Dan Golden profiles in his book and in the Wall Street Journal. Dan Golden, by the way, is a graduate of H.</p>

<p>My point is not to bash the schools, but to point out that they aren't telling the truth when they say that they treat every applicant equally. We all agree that right or wrong, some connected applicants are given preference. Thanks to Dan Golden, the WSJ, and the Crimson, the extent of alumni and other preferences is now public knowledge.</p>

<p>(data from WSJ here: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/golden4.htm;%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/golden4.htm;&lt;/a> Y is not mentioned, although Princeton, Stanford and Penn are)
(z-list and legacy data from Crimson here: The</a> Harvard Crimson :: News :: The Back Door to the Yard)</p>

<p>As I understand it, the "Z-list" has nothing to do with legacies or political connections, although kids who are legacies or politically connected may well be found on it, alongside other kids who are neither. It's just a mechanism Harvard has for admitting people but deferring their enrollment.</p>

<p>The "Price of Admission" data are way out of date at this point. I don't think the legacy admission rate at Harvard is anywhere near 40%. And (as I have posted many times before), a few years ago a senior Harvard admissions officer told a friend (who was complaining about his qualified, multiple-legacied child not being admitted, despite constant, high support and involvement by both alumni parents) that for practical purposes Harvard had no legacy preference -- that their internal figures showed they admitted almost as many Yale and Princeton legacies as Harvard legacies. </p>

<p>In other words, children of highly educated, often economically successful parents are admitted at a much higher rate than average. That's hardly big news. The question is whether such kids whose parents include a Harvard graduate get admitted at a higher rate than similar kids without a Harvard parent. Probably yes, but not by much.</p>

<p>Also, I don't know about Golden's figures, but Yale's President Levin said straight out two years ago that Yale's legacy students had significantly higher test scores and GPAs than the class as a whole. (Note that he was talking about enrolled, not admitted students -- not a big difference at Harvard or Yale, but still some difference. Also, the class average includes other kids who may be admitted for special reasons with somewhat lower scores/grades.) The last Harvard legacy admit that I know was also accepted at Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, colleges to which she had no connection whatsoever, and whose admissions standards are not a lot different from Harvard's. Every Yale legacy admit that I have seen in the past 5 years has been in the top quadrant of the class on all test scores and GPA. And I have seen several HYP legacies get rejected at their legacy college and accepted at one of the others, or similar places (Stanford, Oxford), which is further evidence that legacies don't actually have it easier at all.</p>

<p>What's more, I don't think the schools actually claim to treat everyone equally. They admit that there is a legacy "tip," although they downplay it. Do they deny the existence of developmental admits? I don't think so.</p>

<p>All the Ivies and top schools claim they are meritocracies. Those claims are demonstrably false, and the legacy "tip" is more like a gigantic shove as the data clearly shows. You obviously did not read the Harvard Crimson article, which exposed the Z-list for what it is: affirmative action for the rich and connected.</p>

<p>The series of Wall Street Journal articles and subsequent book by Dan Golden--which led to his winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2004--speak for themselves. You owe it to yourselves to read them. They explain exactly how powerful families use their wealth and connections to gain a huge advantage in the college admissions process. It's knowledge that will eventually help many of you here on CC, when your own kids are ready to apply to college.</p>

<p>Best wishes to you all. Over and out.</p>