Statistically, legacies major in harder subject than non-legacy students. The data does not support your assertion.
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Almost all of the conversation on this subject have centered around âfairnessâ and âqualificationâ from the point of view of the applicants. Itâs a conversation worth having, but it only touches on 1 aspect of legacy, and almost any other preference that makes up holistic admissions.
First, as @DadSays points out in #239, we are talking about a situation where we are allocating limited spots to multiples of highly qualified students. I am not talking about students who are just qualified to graduate within 4-6 years, but students who have the potential to truly thrive at these schools, the 6,000 to maybe 10,000 that get to âfinal committeeâ. From these wealth of riches, the highly selective schools have the luxury of shaping their classes to meet their institutional needs. These needs will be different in type and especially in weight for each institution and also change over time. Institutions are considering their long term and short term interests.
In addition to the institutional perspective, letâs also not forget the perspective of students who are fortunate enough to get in. In many ways their interests align more closely with at least the short term interest of the institution than that of applicants in general.
So now why is legacy such an attribute? Historically, it was not âcalled outâ, but just a fact of the tiering of American society. People of a certain social strata went to certain boarding/private schools that fed certain colleges. As colleges started to use objective metrics, as noted above, certain groups not of the desired classes started to make uncomfortable headway in admissions. Some have noted above that âlegacyâ advantage was implemented because of the need to limit Jewish students. Actually, I think it was the entire concept of âholisticâ admissions that aimed to do that â the legacy advantage had always existed. Why is an âathleticâ rating still one of the primary ratings for Harvard? That is a vestige of the effort to exclude Jews.
Today the reason for special consideration for legacy has to do with a perception that it is a necessary tool for alumni engagement, and not necessarily donations. The endowments for some schools are so large that short of multimillion donations to fund a capital project, alumni donations donât budge the needle. However the relationships developed with alumni for the benefit of the institution and for its students is valuable. We can debate whether or not legacy preferences are a needed tool for this, but at least the schools who still have legacy policies believe so, and they are in the best position to judge this. Another factor to consider for legacy admissions is how important history and tradition is to a particular school. HYP (and others) are uniquely who they are because of history and tradition. They are social glue that bond todayâs students with each other and with yesterdays students, creating strong relationships during and after college. I just attended a reunion (and not a big year like the 25th) where we had between a quarter and a third of our class in attendance. Legacy students are uniquely able to impart this sense of history and tradition based on their familiarity with the school. Now not every student or alum cares about tradition and history, but enough do.
Going forward, will schools continue to practice this because it is in their interest vs the negativity associated with it? Who knows. The % of legacies in my day was 20-25%. Itâs been in the 10-12% range for the past 10 or more years (the 14% this year I think was a blip because a lot of legacy kids decided to defer because of Covid). If no consideration were given to legacy status, maybe the ânaturalâ percentage drops to the mid single digits. Most of the legacy classmates of my kid (my kid included) were cross admitted to other T10-25, including HYPSM, so maybe they did not need the âboostâ, however large or small. Personally, I did welcome this sign of loyalty to me as an alum.
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You are continuing to make this claim without offering a single credible and authoritative piece of evidence to support it. Itâs arguing/debating in extreme bad faith.
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Youâre talking about averages. Averages are misleading. Those legacies who wouldnât otherwise get in without legacy preferences arenât majoring in the harder subjects or taking tougher courses.
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Grade inflation, reduced and easier core curricula, creation of less rigorous majors, etc. arenât evidences? Are you saying they donât exist?
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Iâm getting off topic. By workers I mean PhD researchers (and farm workers also). Happy to discuss by PM.
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Are you suggesting that US universities should just follow the admission policies of foreign universities when it comes to how they choose to admit? Why should this matter and why do you point out those particular universities? If these schools admit their students SOLELY on grades and test scores, tens of thousands of kids with 4.0 and perfect 1600/36s would still be rejected!!! What would be your suggestion then?
On a lighter note, maybe the preferences they received should be noted on their diplomas and transcripts? 
More seriously, those who are in the preferred groups are often, collectively and often wrongly, perceived to be less âqualifiedâ, regardless how well qualified they are. The preferences are unfair not only to the non-preferred groups, but also to those well qualified within the preferred groups.
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Those things exist, but legacy populations have decreased, not increased, in the last decades. Apparently things were more rigorous when more legacies comprised the class at elite schools?
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The overall proportion of students in preferred groups has increased, donât you think? Legacy preference is part of the problem.
Are you certain this is true. Plus the other statement that you have made that legacies are more academically qualified than other students.
My recollection from data that @Data10 cited during threads on the Harvard lawsuit was that legacies were not more academically qualified. I could be misremembering.
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It probably has not changed a lot over recent decades, though if you go further back, it has probably decreased substantially since the 1950s or so in the elite private colleges (which at the time took most students from preferred boarding schools that were SES elite, but not necessarily academically elite).
Of course, admission competition, for both preferred and non-preferred groups, has increased substantially at the elite private colleges.
Legacy applicants or legacy admits?
I think this is very well said and matches my experiences with both elite universities and prep schools (which my children have attended). Though my undergraduate institution keeps getting brought up over and over again in this thread, Iâve avoided talking about my experiences there for a variety of reasons, one of which is that I am unsure how relevant my experience of decades ago is to todayâs admissions. But on the topic of who is âqualifiedâ for admission, it seems to me that for private colleges, that has always been defined in the eye of the institutions not the applicants. That was true 25 years ago, and it is still true today.
However, I bristle, of course when I read about affirmative action and the assumptions of people who post about lack of qualifications. The one thing that I can say for sure both from my experiences as a student and those of my children is that there are underprepared students at these institutions of all races and I think that is OK. I donât think that underprepared always means under qualified. I certainly donât think it means doomed. My closest friend in college was a white person from Appalachia. They struggled mightily out of lack of high school preparation and culture shock. It took a lot of work and and a LOT of personal pain to graduate (a couple of years late), but they did and moved on to a fantastic career and life. As I read some of the comments here, it seems as if many would say that person did not belong at our university because their entering SAT scores were significantly lower than mine. But the school took a risk and maybe even more importantly, my friend and their family took a huge risk because leaving Appalachia for one of those schools is venturing to the unknown. The risk turned out to be well worth it for that student. The one thing that I really appreciate about how things have changed in the intervening years is that some wealthy schools have become no loan schools for students below a certain income because my friend graduated with far too much debt and didnât have any financial support from family. It took a long time to pay off, and it prevented some grad school paths that they might have taken if their financial reality had been different.
Somewhat similarly, my daughterâs good friend is a very low income Asian-American student (no English is spoken in the home). That student was admitted to one Ivy League college and several âtippy-topâ liberal arts colleges. Their original SAT scores were actually significantly below my daughterâs (probably because my daughter was fortunate to go to a really strong elementary school followed by an equally strong middle school) and their GPA was also lower becuase that friend spent their freshman and sophomore year of prep school really struggling to catch up with classmates. Retaking the SAT helped, but the score was still somewhat low compared to average student in the graduating class. I am thrilled that the admissions committees were able to look past relatively lower stats and see what a fantastic catch my daughterâs friend is. Anecdotally, and perhaps this is âunfair,â it does seem as if the first generation and low income students at my daughtersâ prep school had relatively more success in the college admissions process than wealthier students with similar grades/scores from the graduating class. Of course this is all hearsay from my daughter since I donât know their stats personally. From her friendship group, I do know what amazing and resilient young adults they are.
And of course, plenty of wealthy white and Asian-American kids from her graduating class were admitted to those elite colleges as well in addition to quite a few international students --after all college advising is part of what their parents are buying when they pay that obscene tuition. Actually I would argue that pretty much everyone in the graduating class was admitted to terrific colleges even if they werenât all admitted to their first choices. Even the weakest students ended up with good options.
In any case my daughter did see some friends who were legacies (even double-legacies) turned down their parentsâ colleges as well as some \ very high stats friends with âsurprisingâ results. By âsurprisingâ I mean that they were not admitted to schools that their parents were sure they âdeserved.â And some parents were angry; they just couldnât blame their results on legacy applicants given there were legacies in the class who were also turned down. That is when I suddenly saw some vitriol directed at FGLI, black and latino students and assumptions made about qualifications --from angry parents not from the children themselves. Or perhaps the kids just hide it better.
To me it boils down to the fact that some of those universitiesâ missions lead them to care about traits beyond near perfect GPAs and near perfect scores. Some of the students with the most success in admissions were just really wonderful people who were strong contributors to their classrooms, the school in general, and/or external community, and I assume those traits came out in their letters of rec and essays. Some I think just benefited from great counseling and applying in ED and ED2 rounds. Among the âunfairnessâ at play in the admissions, college advising at certain schools and paid college consultants are a huge âunfairâ advantage that some kids have though I think there are some additional benefits to prep school for families that can afford it or middle-class and low income families who are lucky enough to gain admission and funding for those schools.
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I should clarify that I meant lower minimum academic standard when I said âlower academic standardâ. The minimum academic standard is driven by the least qualified subgroup of students, not some averages. The boarding school graduates may have been a preferred group at some elite colleges, but those boarding schools tended to have higher academic standards than other typical schools. Even though some of these students may have been admitted preferentially, they, by and large, did not belong to the least qualified subgroup of students in college.
Good point and I am not sure which is correct. Probably applicantsâŠ
Vance Packardâs The Status Seekers indicates otherwise at HYP, describing those boarding schools in the 1950s as providers of âgentlemen Câ students to HYP who nonetheless went places based on lineage and inheritance, while they got their academic strivers from everywhere else.
Of course, times have changed since then, when it became less socially acceptable to coast through life on lineage and inheritance, so that one has to have at least the veneer of earned achievement. Over time, this became somewhat more than just a veneer, so that the upper crust was willing to pay for increased academic opportunities for their kids, and those boarding and other elite private high schools responded to the changing market with high-end academics.
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This is exactly right. I came from a putative disadvantaged group back in the 60s as defined thenârural Midwest working class. Got into HYP. I am very familiar with the current students and the legacy students today are not at all comparableâ the equal or better of their non hooked peers. The stereotypes about legacies thrown around by some on this thread just make me shake my head. But I know neither data nor anecdotal information will change minds.
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Those âgentlemen Csâ would likely be equivalent to the As now.
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With average GPAs in the 3.5-3.6 range, perhaps âgentlemen B or B+â?
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