<p>cpt – You are mixing things up a lot. I don’t know what the exact legacy percentage is at Yale right now, but for years it has bounced around between 10% and 15% – so probably 12-13%. Brenzel says 20% of legacies were admitted this year, which seems low to me, in historical terms, but not vastly so. For years, purely on the basis of my and my friends’ experience, I have been saying 25-30%. Of course, that’s much higher than the average admission rate, which has been in the vicinity of 6%.</p>
<p>A standard Yale class is about 1,300, of which 160-165 or so will be legacies. Yale’s general yield is around 70%, meaning it accepts about 1,850 students to fill its class. I have never seen anything that specifies the legacy yield, but based on my friends’ experience it would be darn close to 100% – I know of one legacy kid accepted in the past decade who enrolled someplace else (Harvard). I won’t assume a 100% yield, so it looks like something like 10% of those accepted, say 185, will be legacies.</p>
<p>The overall applicant pool is about 30,000. If 185 legacies are accepted with an acceptance rate of 20-25%, that would mean 750-900 legacies in the applicant pool. Note that a certain number of legacies are also URMs and/or recruited athletes, too; there’s some overlap between the legacy percentages and those categories, and also international students, who represent about 10% of the class. If you add up all of those groups, and adjust for the overlaps, you are probably talking about 40% of a class, maybe a bit more. In other words – and this should come as a shock to no one – in rough terms only a little more than half of any class is comprised of unhooked kids accepted solely on the basis of their academic and extracurricular high school records. They do probably represent a somewhat larger percentage of acceptances, since I think the legacy, international, and recruited athlete yields are very high.</p>
<p>As for developmental admits, that is maybe 4-5 kids/year, at most. Trust me, on the basis of quite a number of people I know, donating $1 million over the course of 15-20 years doesn’t move the admissions needle much, if at all. Five times that probably does, but in the case of an unqualified kid all it may get you is a very polite, very heartfelt meeting long before any applications would be submitted at which it is made clear that the child should not apply.</p>
<p>As for the supposed 150-point SAT advantage vs. Yale’s claim that legacies have higher-than-average SATs: The academic study that estimated the SAT advantage covered 14-15 colleges, most of which were meaningfully less selective than HYPS, and some of which I believe use legacy preference as a recruiting device, especially of full-pay kids. Also, in estimating that advantage, I believe the study factored out things like athletic and URM recruiting, and international students (whose CR scores are often below average if they are not native English speakers). The “average” SATs to which Dean Brenzel and President Levin refer no doubt includes all athletic recruits, URMs, and international students. So it’s theoretically possible that Yale legacy students as a group have SATs that are higher than the average for the class as a whole but lower than the average of their unhooked, non-URM classmates. Except, I doubt that’s true, or that it’s true by anything like 150 points. The legacies I know who have gotten in (and most of the legacies I know who were rejected), whose SATs I knew, did not have SATs low enough to be 150 points lower than anything.</p>
<p>Finally, I note the Harvard admissions office claim that I heard second-hand from a disappointed Harvard alum, and which various other people on CC have confirmed: Harvard periodically looks at its admission rate for Yale and Princeton legacies (who receive no special consideration, of course), and that rate is essentially the same as the rate at which it admits Harvard legacies. In other words, there is really no legacy preference beyond the many advantages conferred by having smart, sophisticated, and generally affluent parents. Or, in the alternative, what goes on in special legacy admissions is that a few legacy kids who might have gotten accepted on academic merit are shunted aside for slightly less qualified kids of parents who mean more to the university. It’s hard to get too worked up about that.</p>
<p>I will close by saying that, at least in my experience, legacy kids admitted to Yale (or similar colleges) who apply elsewhere generally are accepted elsewhere, often everywhere elsewhere. That happened with one friend’s child this year – accepted at Yale with legacy status, and also at Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Williams, and Swarthmore (and rejected nowhere). And plenty of legacy kids rejected at Yale are accepted someplace equally selective, like the friend of my kids who was rejected at Yale, despite legacy status, and accepted at Harvard and Oxford (and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard). In real life, legacy status does not seem to mean much.</p>