I’m kind of curious about how Columbia would view my situation, which is legacy-ish. My brother has almost ten years on me and graduated the engineering school in 2011. I know schools typically don’t care when it’s siblings i.e. like a 2 year age difference but there’s a pretty big age gap between us. It’s not like he’s donated any money to Columbia. So will they even care? Do they look at the type of student a sibling is and judge or is it essentially the same as leaving it off the application? I view myself as a pretty okay candidate, i.e. median scores for SAT percentiles so I’m looking to treat that as nothing spectacular but nothing terrible for the purpose of this post.
According to the admissions website, “legacy” status is only for children of graduates of the College or SEAS. Siblings don’t qualify. No harm, of course, in mentioning a sibling’s Columbia ties, in the essay or elsewhere.
Columbia accords some preference to legacies but much less than Penn or Dartmouth. They say legacy status will get you “an extra look”.