Legacy still matters a lot at Harvard. Certainly not anything like a guarantee, but definitely an edge. We’ve seen it year after year at DC’s school.
@exacademic that jives with what we know from my relatives’ experience with Harvard.
Legacy at Harvard has the weight of a “feather on a scale”. I am an active alum. I know. And if you weigh yourself everyday, you know , how much weight a feather carries.
At PENN it really does matter. A thumb on the scale.
If you are a double oehavy at Harvard or multigenerational and a big donor, then yes . IT could ake a difference. But not for your run of the mill legacy.
Wrt to Harvard, legacy is meaningless if you’re not already in the running for other reasons. If you are, and if you are competing against other (similar) applicants who aren’t legacies, then legacy can be decisive.
The feather/thumb/scale analogy suggests an approach that’s more numerical and undifferentiated than Harvard’s actual admissions process. Harvard likes to point out that its legacy admits have higher stats than its admits as a whole, but that’s somewhat misleading in the sense that the legacy admits will inherently be children that started out with educational and/or economic advantages. To accurately assess the role legacy pays in admissions, you’d need to compare legacy admits with other admits from their demographic cohort (e.g. at very least, to hold geography and SES relatively constant).
I think there was some research done on legacy influence on admission by comparing applicants who applied to multiple schools and had legacy status in one institution but lacked that status in another institution. The researchers found that these applicants gained a significant advantage in admission at the legacy institution compared to the non legacy institution because they were admitted at a much higher rate at the legacy institution compared to the other schools.
Legacy will only make a difference as a real tie breaker at Harvard. The issue is that a true tie between two candidates is exceptionally rare. It has been meaning less and less in recent years. I would caution anyone from applying to Harvard thinking that one parent legacy by itself will provide any meaningful differentiation.
True however your making it sound like it comes down to just two students. The last 200 in are looking exactly like the last 200 out.
I was amazed at the overlap. I guess if you are applying to a top 5 school, you might as well apply to all of them.
That’s what most do. The selection process is somewhat random when you have different people looking for different things at different schools and you don’t really know what will catch some admission officers eye. Like people say, one year you would be accepted and the next denied with the exact same application. This is why we are seeing the explosion in numbers as many kids/parents choose to apply to many of the top schools hoping that one of them likes there application. Also a reason I’m a fan of ED, if accepted ED, your done. Applied to your first choice and got in. Otherwise its time to throw apps all over and see what sticks.
There are lots of “ties” (though, again, it’s not a numerical process and, even when numbers are involved, they are not rank-ordered but categorized). Standardized test scores weren’t designed to differentiate among highly qualified candidates and HS grades have become so inflated that many, many kids in the pool will have UW GPAs > 3.75. Even class rank doesn’t sufficiently narrow the field.
And admissions decisions for applicants from high schools that routinely send a few kids to Harvard each year will often come down to “which one of these two (or three) kids do we take?”
In the “olden days”, legacy definitely mattered because Ivy’s and other selective schools didn’t always choose the top kids (excluding, for instance, Jewish applicants at some elite schools . . . ). Your family/wealth/social prestige usually did the trick. If you were a middle class social climber then they would eventually accept you as well, provided you were the “right” ethnicity, etc. And of course for a couple decades following Great Uncle Fred’s graduation from Harvard/Yale etc., their kids probably did enjoy a definite, expected advantage.
While those days are - thankfully! - long gone, legacy probably does still matter at the margin. (“all else equal” or “holding other factors constant” would be equivalent descriptions). That makes sense - whether it be nature or nurture (or a combination thereof), schools just have a more known commodity with the legacy applicant. Good news and success does tend to repeat in families.
Very intererested in the study that found there is a distinctive advantage to legacy even currently. Wondering what schools were included in the study. Also, where do these researchers find these data sets? Why can’t we on CC get access to them? :-?
Here is a summary of the study
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Legacys-Advantage-May-Be/125812/
I have seen several situations with candidates from the absolute tippy top elite NY privates schools with straight A GPA , great EC’s and 32-31 ACT who applied to Harvard with a single legacy and they got deferred and then rejected. (They tend not to reject legacies early.) So legacy does not make up for slightly lower test scores, for example.
A 31 is bottom quartile for Harvard matriculants. Presumably “the absolute tippy top elite NY privates” have many kids applying to Harvard each year with better scores than that. So not a tie breaker situation – these kids weren’t academically competitive within their subpool to begin with and legacy didn’t change that.
Going back to the matter at hand:
Am I wrong to read your Naviance lists as a sign of the importance of a school’s geographic location, and other top schools that are close by? For example, the lists (to me) seem to show that geographic location plays a significant factor in determining the applicant overlap pool.
If you look at UChicago, Northwestern is the #1 school in terms of overlap. As the schools are so different, I doubt that would be the case if UChicago was located, say, in Baltimore or Boston. Similarly, if you look at Stanford, there is overlap with Berkeley but also USC, UCLA, etc. Stanford’s most direct peers in terms of stature are probably on the east coast (or maybe midwest), but the Naviance list demonstrates the impact of a school’s geographic location on overlap.
(Same for Duke, btw - as the lack of overlap with schools in the southeast demonstrates that Duke doesn’t really have peers in this area. And, this seems true - Duke is actually a closer drive to UPenn than it is to, say, Vanderbilt.)
So, there’s a lot of overlap between Princeton and Penn (and UChicago and Northwestern) simply because they are top schools that are close to one another.
Aside from that, I don’t know if the Naviance lists tell a whole heck of a lot.
@Cue7 You are free to draw any conclusions you see fit 
Personally, I do think there is some amount of geographic affinity, but I don’ think that is all the data tells us. It gives us a peek into the minds of the students in terms of which schools they place in approximately the same brand tier.
So what do you make of so much overlap between UChicago and Northwestern, or UPenn and Princeton?
UChicago and NU are really different schools, and Princeton and Penn are really different schools. In that vein, actually, Stanford and Berkeley are very different too.
What do you make of all the overlap present here?
(I also worry, with Naviance being seemingly incomplete and over represented in some areas, that the data is skewed a bit, but that’s a separate point raised earlier.)
@Cue7 Several possibilities
- Applicants don’t consider these schools different
- Applicants don’t care about how they are different. Instead they only care about how they are similar. So NU and UChicago being good private schools in Chicago is more important than their differences
- Applicants may know and care but they also know that they can’t rely on any single school so they decide to hedge their bets
- For many high school students applying to these schools, brand and prestige trump fit so NU and UChicago are close enough brand and prestige wise that other things take a back seat. If they get admitted to both, then they will get picky and really give it some thought.
If you really want to track similarities (not prestige) than UChicago is more similar to Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth, and NU is more similar to Stanford, MIT, and Princeton, mostly due to the engineering curriculum.