Legacy Limitations

Going to keep this brief. My application is as strong as every other kid applying to Yale. 35 ACT, top of class, national extracurricular, 800 and 790 on Spanish and bio subject tests, blah blah blah who cares they deny thousands of kids much better every year. But, found out through ancestry.com a residence hall is named after my great^3 grandfather and about 10 relatives of mine all graduated from Yale. Problem is, this was the 1920s-1950s. Will this increase my chances? I mean there is an actual residence hall named after a direct blood relative of mine. If I am still firmly denied it would not surprise me in the slightest but just wondering if this does anything for me.

Not in the slightest.

I don’t think they’ll research on ancestry.com. Did you highlight this in your application?

Your credentials sound good, but the family link won’t help at all. If anything, having such a well educated family will raise expectations compared to students from families with less resources/less supportive of education.

Based on the experience of an applicant I know - qualifications like yours, similar mult generational ties to Yale (including buildings) but much more recent (including live grandparent alum/donor), nope.

Don’t think it will boost your chances but the search and discovery of this information may be a good essay or short answer topic.

As someone once said, “what have you done for me lately?”

Yale admits ~20% of legacy applicants per year (they inform the relevant Yale grad of this fact when Yale receives the application) and ~15% of the enrolled class, or ~220 students, are legacies (Yale discloses this publicly). So, ~1,100 legacies apply in a given year, and ~900 of them are denied.

The admit rate for legacies is ~3x the admit rate for the overall pool, but there are a number of reasons for this. First, legacies tend to have much better credentials than average. By definition, they have at least one relative - most often a parent - who went to Yale, and therefore come from a family that is likely to care a lot about education and is a lot more likely than average to be well-enough-off to live in a good school district, or send their kid to private school, afford tutors, etc. Second, the applicants who come from families that are generous to the school in terms of time or money are going to get extra consideration.

What legacy in isolation gets you is a second look, helping to ensure you don’t fall through the cracks (which is valuable on the context of a pool of more than 30,000 applicants). Assuming you’ve got the baseline stats required (and, from what you’ve disclosed, it sounds like you do) it then comes down to what else you bring to the party.

This brings me back to “what have you done for me lately?” Everyone’s admitted for the totality of what’s in their app, and having relatives who were generous a hundred years ago isn’t a big boost. Unless your family has been notably generous much more recently, apart from the second look you’ll get (which is valuable in itself), if you get in, it will be because of all of the other aspects of your application.

If the relative was a Calhoun, it might hurt.

^Or even worse–if you are a descendant of Yale still admiring what he stood for and how he made his fortune.

Most of Yale’s colleges and dorms are named after prominent 18th and 19th Century men. Four or five (or more) generations down, each of them may have hundreds, even thousands of descendants. (There will be a lot of overlap, too. Especially since Timothy Dwight was Jonathan Edwards’ grandson.) A high percentage of New England WASPs can probably claim a family connection to some Yale building.

My best friend growing up was a descendant of Edwards and Dwight. He was actually named for one of them, although he generally went by a different nickname. He did go to Yale, but no one ever suggested that his name and parentage had anything to do with it. None of his ancestors in the past 100+ years had gone to Yale, as far as he could figure out.

Only 11.9% of Yale college students in the most recent class {2021) are children of alumni parents–not 15%. If only children of Yale College parents are counted that number drops to around 9%

We’ve got a couple of Yale connections that run so far back it’s ridiculous. Wouldn’t have helped mine one iota. I’ll admit some collateral ancient relative was linked to Calhoun, too. Point really is, as DB said, “what have you done for me lately?” And what will you add to our community?

And that’s much more than your stats and national EC.

I would be careful with it. It might help if they know you are from that sort of background if they can’t tell already. However, it is hard bring it up smoothly. I had a tutee who was writing an essay on visiting his uncle who was a judge in the city the school was in. I told him that was laying it on much too strong. Just mention the uncle in passing. They will look for that sort of thing. If you mention the connection without proof, they can’t be sure it is true, and if you provide evidence, it doesn’t make you look good. They want someone who will add to the community, and discussing that sort of thing doesn’t make you seem like that.

For those who want to dig more deeply into the numbers, here’s some longer-term data of the sort that @drillteam is citing: https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/w030_fresh_ycparents_0.pdf. It seems that the percentage of alumni children was pretty consistently 12-13%, and children of Yale College alumni averaged a bit over 10% for about the last decade. I see that the admissions office disclosed that 11.9% of the class of 2021 had “legacy affiliation” (https://admissions.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/class_profile_2021_final.pdf), but I can’t independently confirm the Yale College percentage.

Note that the Class of 2021 was the first admitted following the opening of the two new colleges, which meant that it was about 15% larger (i.e., was targeted to have about 200 more students) than earlier classes. One might infer from this that every year nowadays roughly a similar number of legacies apply (~1,000) and are admitted (~200, a few of whom decline their offers), but their percentage of the Class of 2021 and subsequent classes was and will be about 2% lower than in previous years given the expansion.