How important are connections from Harvard?

<p>Is it important to get a letter of recommendation from a Harvard alumni that you worked with? Is it a much bigger advantage if generations in your family went to Harvard?</p>

<p>Read this:
[Writing</a> Recommendations | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/writingrecs]Writing”>How to write good letters of recommendation | MIT Admissions)</p>

<p>And discern what top colleges are looking for. No where will you see “connections”.</p>

<p>^ T26E4 is completely right. To answer your second question, there is an advantage given to students with legacy. However, this only applies to students who had * parents <a href=“or%20one%20parent”>/i</a> who went Harvard, and does not apply to generations further back than that. For example, it will be of no benefit in the admissions process to have a grandparent who went to Harvard. Secondly, though being a legacy does give some boost to your application, it does not compensate if your application is weak in other areas. It should be noted that Harvard still rejects the majority of applicants with legacy status.</p>

<p>Being the child of a professor seems to help quite a bit…nearly all the well-qualified faculty children whom I know were admitted.</p>

<p>^^that is true not only for Harvard, but all other top schools…if you are a highly qualified student then you certainly will have an edge…the administration wants to keep their faculty “happy” and wants to keep harmony within the “family”…</p>

<p>…now, on the other hand, if you don’t get a boost, your “parent(s)” days on the faculty may be numbered…</p>

<p>[Stanford</a> Daily | Connections to University can affect admissions decision](<a href=“http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/03/12/connections-to-university-can-affect-admissions-decision/]Stanford”>Connections to University can affect admissions decision)</p>

<p>"The weight of money
While legacies may receive a significant boost in the admissions process, Golden said that “development cases,” a term that refers to the children of important donors or potential donors, receive an even more substantial advantage.</p>

<p>“It can be as big as 400 or 500 points out of 1600 on the SAT, using the old 1600-point scale,” Golden said. “It can help a student with a score of 1100 out of 1600 get into a top university.”</p>

<p>Golden said that wealthy parents sometimes use private counselors with contacts in admissions offices to indicate that they are likely to donate large sums of money if their child is admitted.</p>

<p>“There’s not an explicit quid pro quo—they don’t say ‘We’ll give you five million dollars if you let our son in’—but there is kind of an implicit understanding,” Golden said.</p>

<p>According to Bev Taylor, president and founder of the college consulting business The Ivy Coach, both legacies and development cases benefit from the fact that admissions offices will look for reasons to accept them.</p>

<p>“They’ll get a better read or they’ll get a second read, they’ll get a second look. ‘How can we accept this kid?’ is the question,” Taylor said. “Instead of looking to see what’s wrong here, let’s look to see how we can accept this kid.”</p>

<p>Taylor said that in many cases where a student has a special connection to the University, colleges look to protect their endowments by admitting applicants who would otherwise not gain admission.
“Whether it’s legacy or development or children of faculty, it’s the family that’s responsible for the endowment, so the college feels obligated to that pay back,” Taylor said.</p>

<p>Both Golden and Reider referenced Margaret Bass ’02 as an example of a classic development case. Bass is the daughter of Robert Bass MBA ’74, who was the chair of the University’s Board of Trustees from 1996-2000 and donated $25 million to Stanford in 1991 and $50 million to the Graduate School of Business in 2005.</p>

<p>According to an article by Golden published in the Wall Street Journal, Bass was ranked 40th in her class of 79 at Groton High School. Out of the nine students from Groton that applied to Stanford that year, she was the only one accepted, though she had the second lowest SAT score of the Groton applicant group.</p>

<p>Her SAT score of 1220, out of 1600, was significantly lower than that of the typical Stanford student. When Bass applied in 1998, 75 percent of incoming freshmen had an SAT score of at least 1360.</p>

<p>“She was admitted because of her last name, and because the family was a big, big donor to Stanford,” Reider said.</p>

<p>In his article, Golden quoted Robin Mamlet, former Dean of Undergraduate Admission as saying that she “will certainly factor in a history of very significant giving to Stanford” when making admissions decisions.</p>

<p>Mamlet also said that the Office of Development gave her a list of applicants who were children of significant donors, which Reider said is not unusual. According to Reider, the admissions office is presented with this list every year, which includes not only children of large donors but also the children of people who are “important to the University.”</p>

<p>“Being important doesn’t just mean giving a lot of money—it means having the potential to give a lot of money or having the potential to get other people to give a lot of money,” Reider said. “There are a lot of ways you can be a development case—you don’t have to be extraordinarily rich.”</p>

<p>Although Reider could not give a specific number for how much money an applicant’s parents would have to donate for the applicant to be considered a development case, a July 2012 Palo Alto Patch article identified a $500,000 threshold, citing two anonymous sources connected to Stanford’s admissions process.</p>

<p>Faculty connections
Reider said that if he could choose any “hook” to have as an applicant, he would want to be the child of a faculty member. According to Reider, being the child of a faculty member means that “you’re already connected,” making it difficult for the Office of Admission to issue a rejection.</p>

<p>“Influential professors can further leverage their influence to gain their student’s admission by threatening to move valuable research funding to another university,” said Irena Smith, a former Stanford admissions officer, to The Palo Alto Patch. “If it is well-known that a faculty member gets angry, he will go elsewhere, then that’s something that is considered.”</p>

<p>Swart said that children of faculty members also benefit from having a “direct line to the Dean’s office,” as faculty are able to “get in direct touch with senior admissions officers to lobby on their children’s behalf.”
Golden said that in other types of special cases, some applicants, such as children of politicians or celebrities, also get a “substantial boost” in the admissions process.</p>

<p>According to Golden, admissions officers will go to what they consider the “lowest limit”—that a student will be able to graduate—for a select few candidates.</p>

<p>“They’ll go that far for a top athlete or a child of a big donor or somebody who’s politically important,” Golden said. “They’ll go quite a ways.”</p>

<p>Reider noted that a student could get a boost in the admissions process simply by being associated with a prominent figure in the University. Reider referenced an applicant who was in the middle of his high school class but was admitted because he was the nephew of a dean of one of the graduate schools.</p>

<p>“He wasn’t a faculty child or a legacy. To me it was a slam dunk that you don’t take him,” Reider said. “But the Dean [of Admissions] said, ‘It’s probably good to have friends in the graduate schools.’”</p>

<p>Taylor said that she has seen several of her clients gain admission to top schools like Duke and Stanford because they benefited from the preferential treatment afforded to what she called “celebrity kids.”
One of Taylor’s clients, the crown prince to “a significant country,” was admitted to Stanford with a relatively low GPA and test scores. </p>

<p>According to Taylor, there was “absolutely no way” he would have been admitted if he hadn’t been an important political figure.</p>

<p>“Maybe one day he’ll come and give a commencement address,” Taylor said. “It’s not always about the money, it’s about who these kids are, what they will contribute in life and how proud the school will be to say that this kid was educated at Stanford.”</p>

<p>^^happens all the time at most of the top schools…but the press love to highlight Stanford and Harvard in particular because they are mentioned in the news most frequently…comes with the territory.</p>