<p>I read on some thread that the acceptance rate for legacies was 40%. I followed the link to this article, which was written a few years ago. Assuming that it has gone down, could it be safe to say that for next year it would be at least 25 or even 30%?</p>
<p>I’ve read that the legacy rate is about double the regular rate, so maybe 15% or so. Legacies tend to be highly qualified, so it’s hard to know how much of the bump is attributable to legacy status.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>^Umm lol? The lowest legacy acceptance rate in the last 17 years was 34%.</p>
<p>[The</a> trodden path: Applying as a legacy - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/05/12/26151/]The”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/05/12/26151/)</p>
<p>Legacy admit rate is typically 4 times higher than non-legacy acceptance rate. And it’s not hard to know how much of the bump is attributable to legacy status if you use multiple regression like this study:
<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webAdmission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20Walling%20Dec%202004.pdf[/url]”>http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webAdmission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20Walling%20Dec%202004.pdf</a></p>
<p>It would have been nice if you had read the article you linked. Based on 1983, 1993, and 1997 data (i.e., completely out of date), it initially concluded that legacy applicants were three times (not four times) more likely to be admitted than nonlegacy applicants, but in response to comments included additional analysis and concluded:</p>
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<p>Essentially, if a Harvard legacy, a Yale legacy, a Princeton legacy, and someone who isn’t a legacy at any of them each applies to HYP, and they are otherwise identical, each of them has practically the same chance of being admitted to one of the colleges.</p>
<p>As I noted, the data used are really outdated. I think everyone believes that legacy preferences have weakened over the past 10 years, in large part due to the spike in legacy applicants as the children of the expanded classes most Ivy League universities adopted in the early-mid 70s have started applying to college.</p>
<p>Okay, good job? First of all, I was merely citing an example of multiple regression being used on college admission factors. </p>
<p>Second, having a 4x higher acceptance rate is obviously not the same as having a 4x higher likelihood of acceptance. Obviously the boost in likelihood of acceptance from legacy status is lower than the raw percentage increase in acceptance rate. I stated that the acceptance rate for legacies is 4 times higher, which is true today.</p>
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<p>Thanks for finding out that legacies have triple the likelihood of acceptance, all else constant. That’s a huge boost - I never knew it was so high. I guess the legacy pool isn’t that much stronger than the regular pool.</p>
<p>Also, “Essentially, if a Harvard legacy, a Yale legacy, a Princeton legacy, and someone who isn’t a legacy at any of them each applies to HYP, and they are otherwise identical, each of them has practically the same chance of being admitted to one of the colleges.” - Lol wut? I don’t think you quite understand what they’re saying. Either that or you are very, very bad at statistics.</p>
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<p>Apparently you don’t quite understand what they’re saying. Either that or you are bad at reading.</p>
<p>In addition, the likelihood
that a student who has applied to all three institutions and is not a legacy at any of them will be accepted by at least one (64.4 percent) exceeds the probability of admission for legacy applicants to a sole institution (50.2 percent).</p>
<p>Hahaha, that is most definitely not the case today (applying to all three, one has a far smaller chance than 64.4% of getting in, which means legacy status has a much higher impact). Also, having a 1.15x higher chance of getting in is very significant - not even close to being statistically irrelevant. Furthermore, it says nothing about how strong legacy applicants are compared to non-legacy applicants, nor does it say anything about how insignificant the advantage for being a legacy is. In fact, I could argue that the boost for legacies is HUGE because of the 1.15 increase in likelihood:</p>
<p>legacy applicants - P(x) = 0.5, P(y) = 0.1, P(z) = 0.1, then P(not x, not y, and not z) = (0.5)(0.9)(0.9) = 0.405 = 40.5%
non-legacy applicant - P(x) = 0.2, P(y) = 0.2, P(z) = 0.2, then P(not x, not y, and not z) = 0.8^3 = 0.343 = 34.3%
(Say x, y, and z are equally selective institutions)</p>
<p>Even though the non-legacy applicant is so much stronger than the legacy applicant that his chances at institutions y and z are twice that of the legacy applicant, the legacy applicant had such a strong boost (5x likelihood in this example) that he still had 1.15x the likelihood of the non-legacy applicant.</p>
<p>Logic fail.</p>
<p>That would be great, random, if you hadn’t gotten it backwards. In the study the legacy applicants were generally stronger than the average applicants. That’s why the authors cautioned that the apparent legacy advantage might not be as significant as it looked. The 15% boost for legacies was pretty much consistent with their higher test scores. And, as I noted, the single-institution advantage of legacy applicants was 3x, not 5x.</p>
<p>(Also – and here I may be bad at statistics – but isn’t your math kind of off there? Since when is 0.8^3 = 0.343? And don’t you want to turn it around and say the legacy kid has a 59.5% chance of admission to at least one of the three colleges (1-0.405), while the non-legacy kid has a 48.8% chance (1-0.8^3)?)</p>
<p>Anecdotally: A few years ago a friend – upset that his and his wife’s four Harvard degrees with Latin honors and ~$800,000 lifetime giving hadn’t made a difference there for their perfectly well-qualified child – had a long discussion about this with a senior Harvard admissions person, who told my friend that the admission rate for Yale and Princeton legacies was only slightly below the rate for Harvard legacies. In other words, children of highly-educated, successful parents tended to have relatively strong applications, and the actual benefit of being a Harvard legacy on top of that was very minor.</p>