<p>I realize that like 17% of the enrolled class has legacy status. Does anyone know what this translates to in terms of acceptance rate?</p>
<p>It’s not quite that high. For the Class of 2012 it was 13.7%. </p>
<p>[Princeton</a> University | Admission Statistics](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/]Princeton”>http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/)</p>
<p>It’s about the same at Princeton’s peers. The acceptance rates are always higher for legacies but the academic profiles for those students also tend to be above the average for the class.</p>
<p>actually the class is 13.7% COMPOSED of legacies. to answer your question, the acceptance rate is around 40% for legacies. and though that might sound particularly horrible… as ptongrad said, its about the same as princeton’s peers. </p>
<p>[Top</a> Colleges Mum on Legacy Admissions - ABC News](<a href=“Top Colleges Mum on Legacy Admissions - ABC News”>Top Colleges Mum on Legacy Admissions - ABC News)</p>
<p>13.7% of a class of 1300 is 178. Assuming that the yield on legacy students is higher (let’s say 75%), then 238 of the 21,964 admitted students are legacies. That leaves 21,726 admitted non-legacy students for 1122 non-legacy spots-- an admit rate of 5.2% Though I see the value to a school of perpetuating family traditions, it hardly seems fair to that equally qualified student who really wants a Princeton education but doesn’t have a parent who happened to graduate from there 25 years ago.</p>
<p>Let’s try this again!
13.7% of a class of 1300 is 178. Assuming that the yield on legacy students is higher (let’s say 75%), then 238 of the 2150 admitted students are legacies. If the admit rate for legacies is 40%, then there are 595 legacy applications. That leaves 21,369 non-legacy students applied for 1912 non-legacy admits-- an admit rate of 8.9% Though I see the value to a school of perpetuating family traditions, it hardly seems fair to that equally qualified student who really wants a Princeton education but doesn’t have a parent who happened to graduate from there 25 years ago.</p>
<p>Thanks, Square-Kay. I see that I worded my response badly. I was actually referring to the OP’s first statement regarding the percentage of the class that consists of legacies (13.7% as opposed to the OP’s belief that it was 17%), not the question about admission rates which are higher and are about the same as at Princeton’s peers. At all of these schools, the acceptance rates for legacy applicants range from about 35% to 45% in any given year. </p>
<p>As the article you linked notes, Harvard, Stanford, Yale and other schools declined to offer the statistics to the reporter. Yale’s office of admissions was being particularly disingenuous in responding that it doesn’t “calculate admission rates for subgroups.” Of course it does and so does every one of Yale’s peer schools. These are sophisticated admission offices that look closely at the numbers and want to understand the trends. They simply don’t want to release the requested information so they claim it isn’t gathered. </p>
<p>Water_man, your calculations are close but just a bit off. You’re probably correct that the matriculation rate for admitted legacies is around 75%. I personally don’t know the true number but it would make sense that it is somewhat higher than the average matriculation rate. Some of your other numbers are, however, wrong. If 13.7% of last year’s class consists of legacies and the class size is 1,243 (not 1,300), then there are 170 legacy students in the class. If their matriculation rate was 75%, then 227 were admitted. If 227 were admitted out of 2,122 total admits, then the legacy students constituted 10.7% of the admitted students. That would mean that 1,895 of the admitted students (89.3%) were not legacies. If you assume that 40% of the legacies who applied were admitted last year (as noted in the linked article), then there would have been 568 legacy applicants out of a total of 21,143 applicants. In other words, about 2.7% of the applicants were legacies, a relatively small percentage. That would mean that there were 1,895 non-legacy students accepted out of a pool of 20,575 non-legacy applicants. This would be about a 9.2% acceptance rate compared to the 9.9% overall admission rate.</p>
<p>Were all these schools to release the legacy admission rates, you would find them to be roughly equivalent. Within the Ivy League, Penn and Yale are thought to have slightly higher admission rates for legacies of the college, Princeton is about in the middle and Harvard is on the lower end but they’re all in that 35% to 45% range. Because most of Princeton’s peers have very large professional schools of law, medicine and business, they may actually have more applicants claiming a legacy connection through these schools but all of them are comparable if looking at just the children of undergraduate alumni.</p>
<p>Also as noted in the linked article, you’ll generally find that the academic profiles (GPA and standardized test scores) are higher for legacies than for the average of the class. I was not a legacy, but the students I knew who were, were some of the most humble, enthusiastic and brilliant of my friends. This is also interesting. Under the previous Dean of Admission at Princeton, the percentage of each class that consisted of legacy students was just 10 to 11%. Under the new Dean of Admission, that has crept up to its current average of around 13%. Yet, at the same time, the average standardized test scores for the matriculating classes has also increased, perhaps reflecting the fact that the legacy admits tend to have higher scores. There is a relationship here with other “subgroups” as well. For example, if your combined SAT average is 2300 or higher, you have a nearly 30% chance of being accepted. There is some overlap here with the legacy group.</p>
<p>I’ll stay away from trying to answer the question of whether or not the difference in acceptance rates is “fair”. What can be said is that, academically, the legacies are better qualified than the average student in the class. Each of these schools has dozens of “subgroups” with which it is dealing in trying to assemble an interesting and diverse class. Is it “fair” for instance, that athletically or musically talented students should be given preferences? Is it “fair” that being from a low income family or an underrepresented state should make your chances better? Is it “fair” that playing the flute in an application year when the orchestra needs a flute player should give you an advantage over applicants who play the violin when there are dozens of applicants with that skill? You can begin to see that the question itself doesn’t make sense because there are multiple goals that each school is attempting to meet. The problem is that each subgroup of applicants tends to think that the particular set of skills it has or the background from which it comes should be a “goal” that takes precedence. </p>
<p>Academic ability is obviously the single most important factor in the admission process but it is far from being the only consideration.</p>
<p>Ivy league admissions is not a democracy. You must drop your notion of fairness in the adult world. </p>
<p>Also, you are ignoring the fact that a huge proportion of legacy admits are highly qualified applicants. Their smart (and affluent) parents made sure they received good educations. The few development cases who may have lower stats–their families had to make eight figure donations. They provide the necessary resources to keep the private schools great.</p>
<p>PtonGrad2000–You make excellent points, particularly the idea that there are probably 100’s of “hooks” each year depending on the needs of the school at that time, and that it is hard to pick out any one subgroup as getting favoritism. Having said that, however, I am still not sure that legacies are a more academically gifted subgroup.</p>