At my last college reunion (Brown) as the parents lamented the fact that their kids were heading off to JHU, Penn, Princeton, Dartmouth and some others because their legacy kids (sometimes double legacy, and sometimes actively involved alums) did not get into Brown, it occurred to the more cynical among us that Legacy in and of itself is meaningless.
What does that mean? If Dad is a social worker and mom teaches HS and the kid is a perfectly lovely BWRK legacy status really isn’t going to do much. If Mom is a Congresswoman and/or Dad a Senator- now you’re talking. Mom won a Tony; Dad is a contender for Poet Laureate of the United States- now you’re talking. The kid just debuted a concerto written for cello and trumpet which won a new music competition- grades are a little shaky, scores are solid, parents are alums- looking good.
These examples (slightly altered to protect my classmates) really have nothing to do with money and development… given that the compensation for a US Representative in Congress is public information, and at least while that person is in office, expecting six figure donations from the family- unless there is wealth from another source- is a waste of time. They have nothing to do with donating a library, or even being full pay necessarily (the musician is on need based aid- parents are both in the helping professions).
But legacy combined with something else- good addition to the pool. But just legacy for an otherwise great student without some other element? Have fun in Hanover.
LF – let’s say you are Duke. Your budget is that more than 50% of your enrolled students have to be full payors. Which are by definition going to be one percenters. Smart kids of one percenters are all going to be looking at the same top pricey schools, and those pricey schools also have the same budget requirement that you do.
So what do you do to make sure that you get your quota of full payors filled but without lowering your academic stats too much? What would be a good pond for you to fish in?
Affirmative action based on family income would be ideal. But you can’t do that. AA based on coming from an expensive private high school would be good too. But you can’t do that either. AA to kids whose parents are graduates of other top rated colleges would also be good. But you can’t do that either.
AA based on applying early. That works and you can do that. AA based on legacy – same. AA based on ED plus legacy – bingo!
The biggest tool in this tool box is high selectivity. That’s a great way to get 50% of your customers from the 1%.
Legacy isn’t about knowing the fight song and the secret handshake. It’s about money.
Depends on how the kid writes it. Lawyer- hard to tell, but likely some pay. Law firm partner- probably full pay. Doctor- very, very few doctors make less than 150,000 a year so likely full pay. Accountant- hard to tell. But write chief accounting officer or vice president of finance and the school knows you are probably full pay.
You might not be able to tell who is full pay for sure, but I’ll bet you could identify a lot of kids who aren’t full pay, even without financial information.
Personally I never understood the appeal of wanting your children to go the same school you went to. Don’t you want them to create their own (new) experiences and live their own life? Why the need for them to follow in your footsteps?
It’s more complicated than that, NW. Partly, you (and others) assume all applications are equal, that a kid with good enough grades and scores, a few club titles, will now be selected for implied family wealth (or conversely, the usual arguments here, for strained finances.) It still depends on the app and the rest. Many kids misunderstand what the different colleges are looking for, in the app and supp. No, it’s not the fight song.
Legacy can offer an edge, regardless of no donations, when the kid is a match, already a match, in his hs choices, performance, thinking, perspective and more. I’ve seen wealthy double legacies rejected, too.
It’s not necessarily a need or a want, but it can be very interesting if it happens.
My daughter (my second child) chose to attend my alma mater. I was a bit surprised; I thought she would choose a different university. But there was certainly no reason to object – the school she chose had everything she was looking for. It would have seemed silly to veto her well-thought-out choice on the grounds that it was the same college I had attended.
It turned out to be fun for both of us to be able to compare notes on our sometimes-similar, sometimes-different experiences at the same university, 35 years apart. And even now, four years after her graduation, that university is a common interest for the two of us. It always will be.
And she didn’t follow in my footsteps. Her experience was her own, and it differed in many ways from mine. People can create their own experiences and live their own lives even if they’re in the same environment.
My kids and I are different people. I loved my undergraduate experience at Michigan and would have felt stifled in a small LAC. Both of my daughters preferred small LACs and thrived in them.
Beyond that, my older daughter in particular was horrified at the idea of having a legacy advantage at any of the schools I hold degrees from. To her that felt like a form of cheating, trading on a privilege she hadn’t earned.
My daughter was just as happy to go to Cornell as I was, but my son wouldn’t have gone there if it was the last college on Earth. He didn’t like its reputation as an academic pressure cooker, and he felt it was much too far away from our home in Maryland. He also realized that if he got in, he would be one of the less qualified people in a difficult major, and he didn’t like that idea. He preferred to be at a school where he was at least in the middle of the pack as far as academic qualifications.
But there are many “unearned” factors that affect a student’s chances of college admission. In-state status. Being a member of an underrepresented minority group. Coming from an underrepresented part of the country.
Are you cheating if you apply to a state university in your own state? If you fail to conceal your minority status? If you come from a state like Montana or Wyoming and apply to an out-of-state school?
How far are kids supposed to go in the interest of fairness?
Full disclosure: My daughter went to a college where she was a legacy. My son went to our flagship state university. So both had unearned advantages in admission to those schools.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt to make a donation in the year or two before a student applies. Particularly if you received any aid as a student, you should be making regular donations to your alma mater.
I know of one university that swears that the university admissions staff have no idea which parents have donated or how much. In that case, a modest donation doesn’t mean anything for admission. However, the really really big donors and the non-alum parents who have the potential to make huge donations in the future still get special attention, with that information provided by the development staff directly to the dean of admissions.
I’ve read of another university that would not give any alumni admissions preference to applicants unless they had a record of consistent donations or at least regular involvement in alumni organizations.
When looking at the stats, keep in mind that the average child of an alum of a selective college is likely to be better prepared than the average applicant. For example, that student is more likely to have attended a high-quality high school, taken challenging classes, and had better advice on how to prepare themselves for the process than the average person in an applicant pool.
“I’ve read of another university that would not give any alumni admissions preference to applicants unless they had a record of consistent donations or at least regular involvement in alumni organizations.”
If you are trying to target only those legacy parents who will turn out to be full payors, screening by a track record of consistent (but not huge) donations would be about the best possible way to do that.
Legacy breaks are fine, just like lots of other breaks that are out there.
Did your kids earn the mommy/daddy full ride funding that enabled them to consider a wide variety of college options? Did they earn the really nice private high school you sent them too? Or the really nice suburban high school that your expensive house purchase enabled? Did they pay the taxes that gave them preferred access to your state flagship? Did they earn those SAT prep classes they attended? Or all the support and lessons they got for their all important enrichment and EC resume? Did they earn the genetic IQ material that they got from mom/dad so that they had the potential to be a great student. And on and on and on.
All those things provided by mom/dad would enable them to get into a wide variety of selective colleges. Getting a legacy break at one particular college is really part of the same cloth.
My older son was a legacy at Harvard. He told the interviewer he didn’t apply SCEA because it wasn’t his first choice. They accepted him anyway. He was a very strong candidate in any application pool with stats higher than Harvard averages at the time.
I really think that accepting legacies is more about tradition and also perpetuating the old boy’s networking club. If you don’t accept enough of them, Harvard would be less attractive because students wouldn’t be rubbing shoulders with the children of the powerful. It’s a balancing act, because they still want most of the student body to be very, very smart and accomplished.
I don’t think it makes a difference if you never gave a penny or if you gave your $50-$100 a year. People who give libraries are in another bucket. That said, I don’t think my brother has given a penny to Harvard since they rejected his daughter. And infuriated him with a fundraising request just days after the denial came in.
BTW you don’t have to be in the top 1% to be full pay. We are in the top 5% in income and about 85% by net worth. And that net worth was all about an inheritance that was time just as our kids were entering college.
“To her that felt like a form of cheating, trading on a privilege she hadn’t earned.”
Welcome to the real world. Would she consider networking with someone who was a graduate of her college cheating too?
On paper, unless a donor makes a significant contribution, like over $100,000 total, giving very little ($5 per year) vs. a lot ($1,000) per year would be treated the same. BUT - I know that my alma mater keeps email lists of people in local alumni clubs and so on, as well as donors, so donating nothing seems like a bad idea unless you are sure you don’t want your kids to go to that school.
My children want to go to my Ivy alma mater because we’ve attended events there with them and we talk about enjoying our time there (we met there). If they can get a boost, why would it be different than any other “boost”? Certainly there is more than enough flack about athletes getting a boost, why would a legacy be considered different? It’s not like athletes aren’t a combination of their hard work and the hard work of people working on their behalf.
“That said, I don’t think my brother has given a penny to Harvard since they rejected his daughter.”
I did the exact same thing after one of my kids was rejected by my alma mater. Since most legacies do get rejected, legacy admissions would not seem to be about max-ing alumni donations.
Just to be clear, I didn’t agree with my daughter. I encouraged her to apply and to wear her legacy status proudly. She wanted nothing to do with it.
But I don’t think any of the other factors you describe are analogous. A legacy advantage in admissions is all about privileging the already privileged. Affirmative action for URMs is just the opposite–the intent is to counter a presumed disadvantage. Same with coming from an underrepresented part of the country (though I’ve studied this pretty closely and I haven’t seen any hard evidence that applicants from underrepresented states actually get any significant advantage at all in elite college admissions, even though people from New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts are absolutely convinced of it) . As for applying to your own state’s public university: these are public institutions, established at least initially with tax dollars and other governmental subsidies precisely for the purpose of educating the state’s residents. There’s no privileging of the already privileged in that—though to be sure, residents of states with outstanding public flagships like California, Michigan, Virginia, and North Carolina may be getting a better deal than the residents of some other states. But hey, that’s how taxation and government spending work. Our city has a better library system than most parts of the state, but we have no qualms about using it; it’s our library system, paid for out of our tax dollars, and that’s what it’s there for. Our county provides several convenient yard waste composting sites, for county residents only; sometimes they check IDs because some neighboring communities don’t have that so non-residents try to use ours. It’s ours, paid for out of our tax dollars. Same with our state universities (though unfortunately ours, while better than most, are not as good as UC Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, or North Carolina-Chapel Hill).
Same with my kids. And my daughters are acutely aware that this puts them in a highly privileged position relative to most of the rest of the world, purely by accident of birth as far as they’re concerned. They’re not always comfortable with that, but they have elected to make the best of it and get the best educations they can. Our ability to pay for their colleges gave them a wider range of choices than most people have, but they still had to work to establish the skills, knowledge base, and credentials to get them into the colleges they wanted to attend. Still, without question, there’s an element of privilege, and they acknowledge it. They both feel an obligation to give back, by using their skills and knowledge to do something to make the world a better place. That is not a bad thing.
No, I’m quite certain she wouldn’t consider it cheating. Everyone networks, and everyone needs to network. Working your college’s network is just something that just comes with the territory once you decide to enter that college. Is there privilege in it? Sure, to the extent it gives you an inside track that others equally capable and equally credentialed don’t have. But playing the legacy card was a line D1 wouldn’t cross. It didn’t bother D2, but in the end she just didn’t like the legacy schools as much as some others…
At my most recent Brown reunion, we were amazed at the number of attendees whose kids went to Brown. What we discussed was the fact that the parents of kids who didn’t get into Brown didn’t go to reunion.
I know more legacy kids at Brown than I can easily count. The vast majority have parents who are teachers and social workers, as well as engineers, lawyers, advertising account executives, etc., and only a very tiny number have famous or wealthy or well-connected parents. Clearly Blossom and I know an entirely different set of Brown alums.
And infuriated him with a fundraising request just days after the denial came in.