I’ll bet that if you correct for STEM preference, Harvard admits a higher percentage of Asian applicants than MIT does.
But it’s probably true that legacy preference does impact admission rates among groups that are less likely to be legacies.
A related point that I wonder about is, how does legacy advantage now compare to the recent past (say 20 years ago)? As noted above, with HYPS admitting 5-7% currently, even with a big boost most legacies won’t get in. 20 years ago, when they were admitting ~20%, the same kind of boost would have put the odds above 50%.
“I’m not sure how many highly selective private colleges and universities don’t consider legacy status. MIT and Caltech are two that don’t. It’s worth noting that the percentage of full-pays at MIT (41.4%) and Caltech (49.7%) is well within the range of full-pays at HYPS (ranging from a low of 38.9% at Harvard to a high of 50.7% at Stanford)—so if HYPS are using legacy status as a filter for affluence as northwesty suggests, they apparently needn’t bother.”
BC – I’d agree with this. The single best way to enroll high SES students is to have extreme selectivity. So HYPSM would likely have well to do enrollments even if they did not do legacy admissions at all and also if they did not do any kind of early admission program.
Once you come down a little bit from those rare-ified heights, I think my argument becomes stronger. As you come down a little bit on the selectivity, you are also coming down a bit on the size of endowment. So tuition revenue becomes more important to the budget. Instead of Harvard think Notre Dame – 50% legacy acceptance rate (versus 20% overall) with 25% of the class being legacies.
Not sure there’s evidence of the boost declining over time as overall standards increase.
In 1992 the legacy admit rate at Princeton was 2.8X the overall rate. In 2009, the 41.7% legacy admit rate was 4.5X the rate for non-legacies.
The numbers for Princeton are interesting. If those are typical of the trend at peer schools, that would say that while it’s gotten tougher for legacies on an absolute bases (~60% admitted in 1992, assuming the overall admission rate was in the low 20s then, compared to 42% in 2009), the relative legacy advantage has increased.
In 1958, the legacy admit rate at Princeton was 70%. If you could possibly graduate, you got in. Don’t know what the overall admit rate was then.
2015, legacy rate was 33% as compared to 8.5% overall. So 4X in raw numbers.
Notre Dame is an interesting case. On its face, it looks like strong support for your argument. ND has a very high legacy admit rate, a very large legacy presence in its student body, and a very high percentage of full-pays, 54.9%. Its endowment is perhaps not as small as you suggest: at $8.0 billion, it’s the 12th largest overall, and at $685K/student those are pretty healthy per capita holdings, certainly not in the stratospheric HYPS range, but stronger than schools like Duke, Chicago, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, etc. Most schools would kill for an endowment that size. Still, at a standard annual payout of 4%, that works out to about $27K per student. So let’s just stipulate that ND is pretty tuition-dependent, as are almost all schools.
But there are ways in which Notre Dame is not a compelling example in favor of your argument. I grew up in Michigan, did my undergrad at the University of Michigan, spent a lot of time in the Detroit area, later 10 years in Chicago, more recently 12 years in Saint Paul. Over that time I’ve known countless ND alums, HS students whose highest aspiration was to attend ND, proud parents sending their kids off to ND, as well as rabid ND football fans who had no official affiliation with the university other than that they identify with and support its sports teams. It goes beyond “one big happy family” with Notre Dame; it’s almost a cult, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully. It just runs very deep in the culture, mostly in urban, Catholic, white ethnic families. And there are historical reasons for it. It wasn’t so very long ago that Catholics were considered lower in social status and systematically excluded from the WASP-y boardrooms and elite clubs and, yes, elite colleges like the Ivies. That went hand-in-glove with with ethnic discrimination against the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Bohemians, the Slovenians, the Croats—the people who made up the bulk of the urban white working class in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Notre Dame stood as a beacon of pride and inspiration in those urban, Catholic, white ethnic communities. ND was not only Catholic, it was proudly Catholic. ND was not only accepting of ethnic minorities, it celebrated its own ethnic roots, proudly calling its sports teams (most prominently its football team) “The Fighting Irish.” ND could stand up to anybody on the gridiron, and, its supporters believed, academically as well. People developed a fierce loyalty to it, and sending a son off to Notre Dame was the proudest moment in many people’s lives. And Notre Dame delivered. ND alums formed their own strong bonds of loyalty to the school, to each other, and to the next generation coming up behind them. Initially excluded from the WASP-y power networks, they built their own power networks, and their own businesses and professional careers. Some became extremely wealthy, others only moderately wealthy, others only comfortably upper middle class. And with rising economic status, their social status also improved, until they were no longer excluded from the corridors of power. But the fierce loyalty to Notre Dame remained in many of those families. Contributions poured in to Notre Dame’s endowment, and the alums wanted nothing more for their children than that they, too, should attend Notre Dame. The school has always recognized and honored that, and it’s proud to have that kind of fierce loyalty in its alumni base, which they believe is good for the school. It’s good for the brand, you might say, except that calling it a mere brand trivializes a cultural bond that goes much deeper. I think Notre Dame attracts and admits such a high percentage of legacy applicants because to do otherwise would be a denial of everything Notre Dame has always stood for. If that also helps out the school’s financial bottom line by skewing the student body more affluent, so be it; but that’s an incidental benefit, not the principal motivation for legacy admissions at Notre Dame.
Notre Dame does, however, nicely illustrate my point about demographic lag. Among top 25 US News research universities, Notre Dame stands out as having the whitest student body. Most top schools now are about 40-50% “White, non-Hispanic.” At Notre Dame that figure is 70.7%. Next closest are Vanderbilt and Georgetown, both about 58%. Well, of course, you might say: although you don’t need to be Catholic to attend ND, it stands to reason that its applicant pool will be heavily Catholic, so not many Asians or blacks will apply, and not many will be admitted. All true, up to a point. But to assume that Catholic = white is to assume the last generation’s Catholicism, not the present day reality. Fully 38% of adult U.S. Catholics are now Hispanic or Latino; the Archdiocese of Chicago, where Notre Dame draws from most heavily, is 44% Hispanic or Latino. Among U.S. Catholics aged 18 to 29, very nearly half are are Hispanic or Latino, while older age cohorts are progressively more white; among Catholics aged 65+, only 12% are Hispanic/Latino. Another 3% of U.S. Catholics are black (Louisiana in particular has many black Catholics, but there are also predominantly black parishes in many Northern cities), and another 3% Asian (largely Filipino, though some Vietnamese and Chinese), along with 2% “other.” All told, today’s U.S. Catholics are just barely majority white, and the U.S. Catholic church will soon be majority-minority. Notre Dame, at 70+% white and only 10% Hispanic/Latino, is clearly out of step, a throwback in time. I’m not saying this is entirely due to legacy admissions; we know there’s a very substantial academic achievement gap between white and Hispanic/Latino students. But legacy admissions at a school like Notre Dame can only reinforce demographic lag. Even the Catholic seminaries (which for obvious reasons don’t practice legacy admissions) are ahead of Notre Dame, with 15% of current seminarians identifying as Hispanic or Latino.
BC- excellent analysis. I might add that in addition to legacy lagging demographics by a generation, you’ve got the cultural phenomenon you raise. In parts of the Northeast, you can substitute Holy Cross, BC and Georgetown for ND and it pretty much describes entire neighborhoods and families. But I don’t see that with the non-White Catholic families, for exactly the reason you suggest- if you haven’t grown up with a grandpa and three uncles and a dad, surrounded by neighbors and friends, all of whom are alums, when it comes time to make the college list, one or two Catholic colleges may make the list- but in the same way that a kid might add Clark or GW or BU (i.e. if the geography is appealing, why not apply to two colleges in the same city instead of just one).
BC – agree with all of that.
ND is the college perhaps most drunk on its own Kool Aid that there is. Rivaled only maybe by the USNA and USMA. Incredibly strong community, bordering on a cult (but in a good way). Their big legacy program is a part of that no doubt.
The big ND legacy program also makes today’s ND student body resemble (no surprise) the characteristics of the ND legacy parents – white, wealthy and Catholic. Even though, as you point out, in the U.S. Catholics overall are not so white and not so wealthy.
ND is 55% full pay, which is pretty high. Think about what that actually means. Year in year out, 55% of ND students are going to be from the 1% and above! I’m guessing a huge percentage of the 25% of their class who are legacies are full pay.
Its selectivity and big legacy program enable them to hit that budget bogey. Do they do legacy JUST to find the full payors? No. But is the favorable full pay effect of legacy just a pleasant budgetary byproduct? I don’t think so. But only a lie detector test of the BOT and admission dean would tell you for sure.
I don’t think ND uses binding ED. I bet if they dialed down legacy admissions they would need to dial up binding ED in order to continue to make budget for full payors. I don’t think anyone disputes that binding ED is very much a full pay device. The fact that a lot of schools bundle legacy with ED is evidence to me that legacy is more about full payors than people think, and less about donations and community than people think.
Legacy admissions didn’t start out, I don’t think, as a full pay device. But now with $60k sticker prices, I think it has become that. Just as is ED, which is a much more recent development.
Northwesty, I agree with you until the last sentence. It really depends on the college in question, and depends on the % of international students (who at schools which do not meet full need are typically UBER wealthy), depends on yield and what the peer group of colleges are doing vis-a-vis ED vs. EA etc.
I still maintain that using legacy as a way to do a back-door on full pay is highly inefficient if you are Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth… I can give you a list of application give-a-ways that are significantly easier for a group of Adcom’s which will result in full pay with a lot less aggravation.
Agree that once you are talking ND or Georgetown or Rice or Vanderbilt the situation changes.
I just want to point out (again!) that you don’t have to be in the 1% to be full pay. You just have to have saved enough to pay for college.
Blossom – I’d agree that the increasing popularity of int’l students has a lot to do with finding full pays.
Mathmom – we are talking about schools that are $60k sticker price and that do virtually no merit aid. If you have banked $250k per kid in a 529 account, you will qualify for no need-based aid.
Maybe some 2 or 3 percenters can do that. Probably no one outside of the 5 percent ($188k annually) could if they have more than one kid.
Two kids outside the 5%, but we did get help from grandparents.
With China’s economic bubble bursting, there may be some fallout for some U.S. colleges and universities. A lot of those full-pay internationals were coming from China. I wouldn’t be surprised if some don’t show up for the fall semester, or are called home before the year is out.
Well here’s an interesting survey just posted by the crimson about harvard’s class of 2019. Sixteen percent of the incoming class is legacy and many come from the top 1%. On average, they have higher SAT scores than their classmates. Article included a comparison to Yale, which did a similar survey by the YDN. Brown, like Yale, has about 10-11% legacy.
http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/
I was interested that the spread of average SAT scores was not that large. URMs may be getting a boost, but they are posting very respectable scores.
As a math mom I’m sure you realize that to have an “average” of 2300 there is only 100 points above to work with so scores are probably pretty tightly clustered around the 2300 with niot many falling below 2200. On the other hand an average of 2149 means that there are 251 points above to average in with the scores falling below 2149. We don’t know how tight the grouping is but it would certainly allow for some scores in the 1900 and 2000 range where I don’t see that as likely for Asians, legacies etc. Just my opinion, YMMV.
@RenaissanceMom I saw that article. It’s only a “survey” but the numbers have been pretty consistent over the past few years. Some of the more interesting (but not surprising) things to glean from the article is that 16% who are legacy admits tend to be white, very affluent, and come from a private (non-religious) school -i.e prep school. The z-listers tend to also be legacies and/or wealthy and can afford to take a year off traveling the world.
With money comes privilege.
Also significant is that some 28% of the students had a close relative (parent, sibling, grandparent or aunt/uncle) attend the school.
Bottom line is that for average unhooked applicant, many of the seats are already reserved for others before they even apply.
“Of respondents who reported a household income of less than $40,000, only one person said one or both of their parents attended the College. Of respondents who reported a household income of $500,000 or more, 43 percent said one or both of their parents did.”
Who knows for sure if schools do legacy admissions with the specific intent of enrolling full payors.
But doing legacy admissions certainly has that effect. FYI, the 1% is $380k and higher.
I think you would statistically expect legacies to have SATs that are at or a bit above the overall average.
Since the average would include the groups that get even bigger boosts than legacies do – URMS, athletes.
A lot of the athletes are legacies doing those prep school sports.
@Falcon1, I do realize that their can be more plus or minus for lower scores. I also think the fact that more Asians have higher scores is that significant. I think the more Asians think they need higher scores, the more they work at getting those higher scores. While other groups may look at three scores over 700 and say, “that looks good enough to me.” No way of knowing of course.