I don’t know. I always assumed my older son was helped at Harvard at least a little bit by being a legacy. They knew it wasn’t his first choice because he told his interviewer he hadn’t applied SCEA because he preferred MIT. Now he was an outstanding candidate with grades and scores that historically resulted in about a 50/50 chance from our school, but still. He got rejected by MIT, Caltech and Stanford. It was the school where he was a legacy that came through. (They had also just announced plans to start an engineering school and hire 100 new professors for it, so that may also have helped.)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: Oops. Sorry. I promise to write NU in the future. I was using a mobile device and trying to shorten my typing.</p>
<p>Blossom: I’m also a Brown alum who has compared notes with many of my Brown friends. I know many kids who got in and many kids who didn’t. But most of the legacy kids who got in did not have any of the additional tips that you mention. They weren’t mega donor, outstanding artists; didn’t have famous parents, etc. The vast majority of admits were “garden-variety” kids with excellent stats. In fact, since I don’t know any mega donors or famous parents and yet I know many legacy kids at Brown, I’d have to say that many those “garden-variety” legacies must get in because I don’t know any other types! </p>
<p>Which brings me back to the OP. Your daughter does not sound like an “average” applicant. She sounds like she’s got the chops to get in – sounds like a great applicant. I know that it often seems like the only kids who get in are those who find cures to cancer or whose parents donate millions, but that really isn’t the case.</p>
<p>Thumper: no doubt that every need-only school gives less institutional aid than HYP, and perhaps S. But an 'averagely competitive" candidate from Brown or NU ain’t likely competitive for HYPS. So, those odds are much, much longer.</p>
<p>But the point is that a Brown or NU adcom ain’t gonna wanna offer an RD slot to someone who is looking to Cambridge or Palo Alto (for whatever reason).</p>
<p>You know, I disagree with that pretty strongly, at least based on the kids I see. I don’t doubt that looking at each class as a whole, you could probably tell the difference between the Brown or Northwestern class and the class at Harvard or Yale. But I haven’t seen a single kid get into Brown who I wouldn’t have considered a decent shot for HYPS. (Well, maybe one, but it was a recruited athlete with a heartbreaking story to explain what was probably a dead-last class rank. And even with this kid, Brown was not the only elite college that said yes. So did Duke.) I don’t know nearly as many kids who went to Northwestern – maybe three in the last 10 years – but one of them WAS accepted at Harvard, and the others were very impressive kids too.</p>
<p>Now, it may be that the Brown or Northwestern admissions office has a much finer sense than I of whom Harvard or Yale is going to take and whom not. Maybe they do pass over candidates who they think likely to go elsewhere. But I really doubt it. That’s too hard a game to play. There are too many great applicants out there, and Harvard et al. don’t exhaust the supply at all.</p>
<p>But how are they going to know this? They’re not mind readers. If Brown or NU wants the student, they will offer admission unless there is some obvious indication in the application that the kid probably won’t attend.</p>
<p>There are many HYPSM competitive kids who do NOT apply to those schools. There are plenty of NU kids and Brown kids who likely would have been competitive for HYPSM but didn’t apply for one reason or another. </p>
<p>I have no evidence to support this…but my guess is that the adcoms at each of these schools I s looking for great kids for THEIR school…and doesn’t give two hoots whether the kid applied elsewhere or might get accepted elsewhere, or might attend elsewhere. They don’t have crystal balls.</p>
<p>Because the legacy does not apply ED. Simple.</p>
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<p>My experience is just our local, public high schools. For example, the Val at our kid’s school has been admitted to H every year for the past 10. But ONLY the Val. Other kids have gotten into other Ivies, such as Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, and Penn, and other highly selective schools such as Northwestern but they are not Val/Sal; great, accomplished kids to be sure (top 10-15 in a class of 550, with nearly 10% NMSF’s), but not Val/Sal (which gets into H). So, at least in my corner of the world, an “averagely competitive” candidate for Brown has no shot at H. Stanford is a different animal since we have quite a few legacies which get a bump, and an athletic recruit every so often.</p>
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<p>Except that adcoms care about yield. They HAVE to.</p>
<p>Well, they DO have crystal balls, to some extent. Unlike practically everyone else in the world, they get to look at the kid’s whole application, and they often interview him or her, too (or get a report from someone who has). So they see pretty much the same information that other colleges see, and (at least at the leadership level) they do the same thing every year, and they probably know a good number of their counterparts at peer colleges . . . so, yes, they are 10, 20, 100 times more able than we are to predict what some other college will do with a particular kid who is also applying to their college.</p>
<p>However, the fact that they may be fairly good at predicting wouldn’t make them perfect at it, and wouldn’t mean that they would let those predictions govern their own actions.</p>
<p>Only to an extent. An admissions office at a top ten school that isn’t one of your magic three or four basically has two choices. It can play defense, “strategically” admitting kids it thinks it won’t lose to elsewhere and trying to protect yield. Or it can play offense, going after the best students in the pool and working to convince them that it’s the best choice for that student. </p>
<p>As best I can tell, yield matters only for a small percentage of the US News rankings, for prestige-measuring contests amongst particularly *****y alumni, and to some CC posters. The brand-name school I’m most familiar with consistently plays offense with its RD admits and is willing to suffer whatever slings and arrows it gets for a 33-34% yield rate out of RD. I wouldn’t have it any other way.</p>
<p>The vals around here usually go to Brown, so perhaps it is only your corner of the world. More importantly, in most corners of this great country, vals typically go to the state flagship. The idea that the tippy top apply to HYPS, then those a notch down apply to the next tier is not true. Harvard does get a handful of remarkable superstars every year, I’ll grant you that, but the majority of the students there can be interchanged for any highly selective college in the US. My S at Harvard could have fit in equally well at Brown or Duke…as could all of his roommates. He hasn’t yet met any bonafide geniuses yet, actually, just a bunch of lucky and happy to be there smart kids.</p>
<p>FWIW, there are quite a few B/H cross admits walking the halls of Brown. I know of at least three in this year’s class (not because they go around talking about it on campus but because they were DSs friends on FB when acceptances came out last spring). I doubt they are the only ones. I know of a couple of B/P cross admits who are at Brown now, too. Contrary to popular belief on CC, there are quite a few students who do as my son did and apply to H just in case they are reading the tea leaves wrong at their top choice school and would be a better fit at H. DS had no desire at all to go to H (and let H know that), but he applied because I told him he should just in case it was the best fit for him out of his acceptances. A couple of other points:
To say that B admits aren’t competitive for HYP is ludicrous. Those who apply ED have already chosen B over HYP. There are many cross admits in RD, quite a few of whom choose B. What a ridiculous statement.
Contrary to CC beliefs, H admits some relatively boring, mediocre kids every year, especially when it comes to legacies in ED, who would probably not get admitted to Brown. Unfortunately for OP, it doesn’t sound like Brown is as open to lowering standards for ED legacies as other schools might be, either. As others here have said, though, you really DON’T have to cure cancer or have an Olympic gold medal to get into a good school. CC standards do not always reflect reality.
For OPs reference, Brown only accepted a few students from our state this year. I think only two–my son and his best friend (who is now at P)–were RD admits. The rest were ED admits. The Brown admits I know are interesting kids who stand out in a crowd as creative thinkers and high achievers. Most have a compelling personal story and an outside-the-box vision of their futures. As for OP, without knowing your Ds ECs, essays, etc., it’s hard to know how competitive she would be for Brown. However, on the surface, her stats are similar to those for kids I know who got accepted to H, D, NU and B ED last year. Unclear as to where the major weakness is, aside from the slightly low ACT (the NU ED admit we know had a 33, as well). Good luck to your daughter!</p>
<p>To answer the original question, yes, there are schools that only take legacy into consideration in the early rounds. Some come right out and say so. UPenn, most notably. I would out and out ask the admissions office of the school in question whether legacy is taken more heavily into consideration for ED than RD.</p>
<p>My knowledge base: Double Harvard legacy applied Early Action, deferred and accepted regular decision. Family member applied regular decision only, accepted regular decision. Binding early decision is a means of intimidation in my book. It assures the school of a certain cash flow as they can lock up affluent students to fund operations while denying choice. I view binding early decision more as a sign of low self-esteem and limiting options at a time of life when most students should not be doing so. If you really belong at a school, you will be admitted regular decision. More often than not, I have witnessed buyers remorse and lots of what if’s among those admitted by binding early decision. Early action is another animal, and most people will probably have difficult decisions to make as they will be admitted to many fine schools.</p>
<p>That wasn’t exactly how it happened, Gourmetmom. What happened was that DS only wanted to apply to four schools. Three of them were top schools where I honestly did not believe DS would be accepted (he was accepted to two of the three, but I had no idea how things would turn out for him at the time–admissions is such a crapshoot). One was a state university (which, actually, became his second favorite school). I basically told him to choose a few other schools to apply to, not as “safeties”, per se (since they were all top schools), but just to cast a wider net. He really didn’t want to apply to the other schools and put very little effort into his apps, but he never said in his apps that he didn’t want to go there. He was contacted by a friend who is an influential H alum twice–both times to gauge his interest in H (I assume so that he could “put in a good word” if DS was interested.) Both times, he told the alum (very politely) that he was simply not interested in going to H and that he had applied to appease my concerns that he was going to be rejected at his top schools. I was somewhat horrified, of course, but DS said that if he had to choose between H and his state U financial safety, he would have chosen the state U in a heartbeat. So, that was how it happened. I know from reading your comments that you aren’t one of those who believes H is the end-all-be-all for everyone, but there are some here who can’t fathom having competitive stats and not wanting to go to H. So, I was simply addressing that faction of the CC population. It’s a great school, but lots of top students are looking for something different. That’s my point. :)</p>
<p>This was part of my kid’s world, more specifically D1. I know GCs at her school had conference calls with adcoms before results came out. The intention was to give adcoms more color about each applicant. Would I be surprised if an adcom were to ask “Where do you think we rank for this applicant?” D1’s GC told her that she was WL at a school where 5 other kids with lower stats were admitted because they thought she would have other (better) options. One school which offered her a full ride called her the day before their decisions came out to ask D1 if they were still a strong contender for her. D1’s good friend also received a call from a top LAC where she was a legacy to see if she would go if accepted. This girl had good enough stats for most top 10 schools. Based on few of my data points, I do think colleges want to admit students who have them as their first choice, and they do what they can to get that information.</p>
<p>Agreed, Oldfort. That was our experience. DS did not want to apply ED anywhere because his situation was not an easy call at all, especially in November. If we had known in Nov. what we knew in, say, February (that he would win some awards and such that made top schools more secure bets), he would have handled his applications differently. However, he was a much more iffy candidate that fall. In the spring, he was a much stronger candidate, and he got calls and emails from several schools attempting to gauge his interest. He wrote to Brown in October and explained that they were his top school, but he wasn’t comfortable applying anywhere ED. Then, three weeks before decisions were released, he wrote to Brown again and told them that he would attend if he was accepted and the financials worked. But he was contacted to gauge his interest by half of the schools he applied to. Schools want to know levels of interest, IMO.</p>
<p>“I view binding early decision more as a sign of low self-esteem and limiting options at a time of life when most students should not be doing so. If you really belong at a school, you will be admitted regular decision.”</p>
<p>Nothing about these schools changes magically from December to April, so I don’t see how it’s “limiting options.” Indeed, I think ED allows the process to be organized and efficient versus long and drawn out.</p>
<p>And “intimidation”? Give me a break, is there an adcom somewhere with a gun to someone’s head?</p>
