Which is more helpful in admissions being a legacy or first gen college?
Some schools do not even consider legacy as a hook. So you would need to specify colleges.
There is no fixed answer. And anyway, why should you care? Obviously you can’t be both.
elite schools, ivies, duke, ucla, ucb, usc
Moreover, not all legacies are the equal. Specifically, there’s a huge “admissions hook” difference between the highly involved, highly respected, and highly influential alum – who also donates regularly and significantly – and the graduate who occasionally attends an event, who has never had a leadership or governance position, who irregularly and parsimoniously donates, and so forth.
The schools at which legacy is most often thought to be a hook (ivies, etc.) actually maintain a limit on the percentage of the incoming class that are legacies, precisely because they don’t want to be perceived as overly favoring legacies, and–think about it–all their alums are counting on some legacy advantage, as well as having brought their kids up to love the schools they attended. Given that the legacies at such schools are likely to have just the kinds of advantages, genetic and cultural, that will allow them to be good candidates, and that they are competing against other legacies with the same advantages, I doubt that being a legacy is a hook at all. A tip, at most, and probably not that. A developmental legacy might have more of a boost, but your typical legacy, no.