As I am an Asian-American whose parents are immigrants, you donât need to tell me about the unfairness of the college admissions process. While a fair process would be nice, the logistics of this utopian world are unrealistic.
Rather than complain, shout grievances, or cry victimhood, my family tries to play the game using the rules as they exist today, and I have no problem with my kids trying to gain advantages where they are offered. Athletic recruitment, legacy, outstanding academics and/or extra curriculars and development are some of the ways to gain and advantage. All of these to me are more fair than something like affirmative action where the students are more often than not less qualified.
It is worth noting that much of affirmative action is driven by progressive white guilt. As I am not white nor progressive, I am not driven by or impressed with any of this.
Honestly, isnât the purpose of this thread and CC in general about how to get into "better "colleges and not about complaining how unfair the system is?
Legacy helps a small population of relatively qualified kidsâŠAffirmative Action helps a large number of kids who are only qualified on a relative scale.
BTW legacy admits are the ones whose parents are alumniâŠdevelopment admits may have (but may not) have relatives who are alumni.
How about using each collegeâs own definition of âqualificationsâ? Somehow I still suspect that none of them will claim legacy status is a âqualificationâ, how ever they define âqualificationsâ.
Not necessarily. Some of these colleges run their lists of legacy applicants through their alumni associations to get their inputs based on activities (including donations) by those alumni. Few alumni donations are large enough to qualify them as development cases.
Some of us have strong legacy hooks. We just choose not to take advantage of them, and/or we think the schools with legacy preferences arenât strong enough, partly because legacy preferences have made these schools weaker, in the areas our kids are interested in.
You wonât get an argument from me that thereâre other unfair rules in college admissions. Iâm for getting rid of them all, including legacy preferences.
Few elite colleges openly say that children of faculty are preferred, but given their sky high admission rates, they clearly are, whether you view that as a âqualificationâ or not. Several qualifications are beyond the applicantâs control, such as their parentâs net worth, university employment, race, or alumni status.
All colleges that offer legacy preferences also offer preferences to children of faculty. AFAIK, the reverse is also true. For example, MIT doesnât give admission preference to children of faculty or staff:
Children of faculty tend to have a higher admission rate because they tend to be, on average, much more academically qualified than legacies (because of the correlation with parental educational background).
There is also a huge benefit to understanding how the system works, especially if they are familiar with that particular university.
I also think that academic parents tend to provide the type of education at home which is a better match to what colleges look at, especially ones like MIT. So itâs not only the level of education of the parents but the direction and focus of the education that they provide at home. After all, academics have a huge effect on admissions, and they value the type of education that they themselves have (and that they generally provide their kids) a lot.
So I think that kids of academics do better than kids of people with PhDs who chose to go to industry or follow another path.
As an aside - itâs pretty certain that kids of academics do better at admissions to PhD programs.
Legacies are more academically qualified than non-legacy applicants, at least at the elite schools I know. Higher scores and grades. Fewer extracurricular accomplishments, just like faculty kids. Why should we prefer one group over another?
Yes, legacy applicants are, on average, more qualified than non-legacy applicants, but that doesnât mean some of the legacy admits arenât less qualified than the non-legacies who were denied admissions because of the collegeâs preference for legacies.
No one who argues against legacy preference has said that colleges should prefer one group, including children of faculty, over another. I certainly think we should do away with all these preferences.
ETA - Higher admit rate doesnât automatically imply admission preference. MIT or Caltech most likely also have higher admit rates for their legacies or children of faculty, but no one cares because they donât give preferences to these groups.
The US is not the whole world. The elite US colleges are not the whole world.
As somebody who grew up in the education system where college admissions are only based on academic merit, itâs unbelievable to me to read 232 comments where half of the people defend the legacy preference.
Legacy preference is unfair. Thatâs it, plain and simple.
European universities, Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, etc. do not use legacy, racial, or athletic preferences in admissions decisions. If even England got away from the legacy âbumpâ, itâs about time for elite US institutions, striving in their mission âtoward a more just, fair, and promising worldâ, to do the same.
A fundamental difference between the US and European elite universities is that the former are mostly private not public institutions. The private US elites get a lot of public grants etc but they are still privately run. That means they have more leeway to do what they want regardless of opinions of outsiders.
Johnson (LBJ) was the most progressive president the US has had since FDR (who was his mentor, BTW, and helped get him elected to Congress). The Civil Rights Act (actually started under Kennedy but passed under LBJ), The Great Society, War on Poverty, massive expansions of the welfare state, and the student loan mess weâre in today began with his administration.
Nixon was not a progressive, rather the reaction to the many progressive failures of LBJ and, of course, the Vietnam War.
I have to say this all the time on this site, I live in a low income area and all of the URM students at top schools from our area are qualified. They come from the top 1% of the class and just because they didnât take the SAT or ACT multiple times to get a near perfect score doesnât mean they are less qualified. AOs see this kid has succeeded in HS, while working a job and participating in sports and ECs at school, with parents that never even finished grade school and donât speak English, they donât have any of the opportunities that a lot of parents buy for their kids, yet they overcame all that. They are qualified.
I think most avg or better kids graduating HS are âqualifiedâ to attend almost any college and graduate. It is not that hard these days to graduate top colleges with a very high GPA.
The issue to me is that they might not be qualified to graduate with any degree. Also, given there are limited spots in âtopâ colleges, it comes down to many feeling that the most-qualified should get those spots.
I am not speaking about URMs, instead just trying to comment that most are âqualifiedâ so I do not think it means too much to say that.
Iâm not sure if you realize that the legacy advantage you and your family enjoy likely comes at the expense of other more qualified Asian-American students, if you believe (as I suspect you do) that these same elite schools that offer legacy admissions also effectively cap the proportion of Asian-American students? Letâs also not forget how legacy admissions at elite schools came about a century ago in this country: they were designed to limit the growing number of Jews and Catholics on their campuses at the time.
Itâs been stated multiple times above already, but this whole thread seems to be fixated on the term âqualifiedâ when it really isnât about that at all. T20s will probably have 15,000-20,000 remarkably qualified, highly accomplished applicants. How they get from 20K down to the 2-3K accepted is not about splitting hairs over whose accomplishments are slightly better than anotherâs - at that level they are so impressive itâs not feasible to do so objectively. That means value judgements come into play. It now becomes about what you will do for Elite College X. Right or wrong, Elite College X will desire some students from among that 15-20K over others, ALDCs, FGs and URMs among them. Elite College X does not have to dip down below that top 15K too often to find the students they seek.
Just because youâre qualified does not mean you deserve a place on the campus of Elite College X.
Before anyone jumps down my throat, Iâm not saying this is right. Itâs just reality. There will be different preferred classes of students in the future, Iâm sure.