I have never, ever heard an admissions officer or any spokesperson for a private college or university say they consciously make an effort to turn away legacies, and I can’t imagine any do. Many public universities say legacy status just isn’t a factor in admissions; a few publics say they give favorable consideration to legacies. Most privates say they give favorable consideration to legacies, though as others have pointed out, they try to walk a fine line, making non-legacies think not being a legacy won’t harm their chances while making alums think their alumni status counts for something. So they make evasive or meaningless statements like, “If you have the credentials to be competitive for admission, then being a legacy can be a ‘plus’ factor, just as being a first-gen or coming from an underrepresented state can be a ‘plus’ factor.” Or, “The legacies we admit have strong credentials, much stronger than the applicant pool as a whole.” Neither of those statements tells you anything meaningful about how much it helps to be a legacy, but people who have studied this empirically say it helps greatly to enormously at highly selective schools, depending on the school. Not to say that legacies with weaker credentials get in, but only that, at any given level of credentials, the legacy’s chances of admission are 45% greater on average, and up to 3 or 4 times as great at some institutions. That is a huge advantage—and it is not inconsistent with either of the pablum statements I quoted above.
I agree; I was just using that as a hypothetical to illustrate that not all “10% of our class are legacy” situations are the same.
When you say “the legacy’s chance of admission is 45% greater,” I know exactly what you mean, but I suspect that a lot of people read that and think that it means 45 percentage points (eg the rate goes from 10% to 55%, or 20% to 65%).
To my way of thinking, if the rate goes from 10% to 14.5%, to me that’s still a “big whoops, you better prepare for a rejection either way.” But I’m pretty conservative in how I read rates in general.
NU was very transparent - they sent out a letter to alums saying that the overall acceptance rate was x and the acceptance rate for legacies had been y. To be honest, I don’t recall what it was. I strongly believe though that one should play a legacy card in ED if possible. We were not donors of any sort other than a nominal $25 here and there.
Here’s the relevant passage from the interview with Tom Parker, Amherst admissions director, in 2006. Parker, who retired in 2011 after 15 years, is a Williams alum who worked in Williams admissions for 20 years before going to Amherst. Keep that in mind when you’re trying to parse the differences between Williams and Amhest. Also of note is that his replacement will oversee both admissions and finaid. Interesting, given the need blind admissions policy. It’s hard to construct a firewall inside one person’s head.
While searching for the Parker interview, I came across an NPR piece looking in on the Amherst adcom with this confession that in the end it can be a flip of a coin:
They also let on that there may be other random factors that applicants will never know about. One year they’re looking for a pianist, the next, a piccolo player.
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/28/134916924/Amherst-Admissions-Process
Admissions has come a long way. From an article by a Williams alum attending her father’s 60th reunion for the class of 1946:
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Having twice experienced today’s college application scene with my own children, it shocked me to hear several of my dad’s classmates explain how they got accepted at Williams: “My headmaster asked my father where he wanted me to go and then called the director of admissions to tell him I was coming.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/02Rgen.html?_r=0
From an article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education (2011):
Did Hurwitz consider the possibility that being a legacy at one elite might be a negative at another elite, especially in the RD round?
Also, I think it’s interesting that his study finds that legacy students have higher SATs than non-legacies, which is the opposite of what the old Espenshade study supposedly shows.
We have to face the fact that all this is filter, refilter, filter again. No one is guaranteed until he gets the fat envelope. Too many variables go into decisions. For us, after we found the good matches, it lowered the pressure. Yes, some of it was aiming high. But we controlled what we could.
I wonder if the Hurwitz study controlled for school policy on primary legacy (undergraduate alumni parents) vs. graduate alumni parents? Graduate alumni status is not considered at schools like Harvard for college admissions, whereas children of graduate alumni are considered legacies for college admissions at schools like Yale and Stanford. I wonder if his research shows a bigger boost for primary legacies even at places that count graduate school alumni children as legacies.
It makes sense to me that legacies at highly selective schools would have higher SAT scores, as those students are more likely to have parents who have money and emphasize education, both of which positively influence scores.
It makes sense to me if there is heritability if intelligence as discerned by SAT scores, which I believe there is. The point being that legacies are children of people who were already selected one time. Their parents were not randomly chosen to attend.
Everyone gets the money and scores equation backwards. High scores give you a better chance to have a high income. Low scores inhibit that. The money is the result…not the cause, no matter how much the left wants to believe it.
“the left?” That’s a little provocative. Not to mention, a generalization since lots of people assume wealth means advantages. What you might say is that the motivation to score well suggests drives. Still, over time, we’ve seen plenty of CC parents of high score kids bemoaning a lack of get up and go, post college.
I still say this legacy has much to do with knowing the college, what it expects and offers.
The data are pretty clear that high family (parental) income is associated with high student test scores. So the causality goes from income → scores, if we mean parental income. One study is at the link below.
Certainly there’s some heritability of intelligence also, but this is not as reliable as the advantages of parental money, due to regression to the mean on intelligence (parents on either end of the bell curve tend to have children closer to the middle) just like other characteristics.
I agree that there’s likely to be some causality in the other direction (scores → income) if we mean student income over time.
I had not previously seen the Hurwitz study. That to me is the definitive statement that legacy is a significant advantage at the fanciest schools. Despite the numerous statements from the schools that it isn’t really that big a deal. Which have always struck me as “the lady doth protest too much.”
Of course the legacy kids are smart and well qualified with high SAT scores. Legacy dummies don’t get into Harvard. But the study shows that when the legacy kid applies to multiple Ivy and NESCAC type schools, the legacy kid does WAY WAY better at the mom/dad school than when those exact same credentials get presented at other schools that have very similar selective admissions standards.
While the power of the nudge varied, the average was that legacy boosted acceptance rate by 23-45 percentage points. I read that to mean that a 10% chance (based on the credentials) applicant gets boosted to a 33-55% chance of acceptance at the legacy school. While many/most legacies would still get rejected, that level of boost is huge. Perhaps not quite as huge as being an athlete or an URM, but close.
“Colleges like to maintain the conceit that faculty, staff, students, alums, donors, administrators, trustees, etc., are all part of one big happy family. Legacy preferences are a big part of maintaining that myth.” Nail on the head @bclintonk you made several excellent points. At schools like Notre Dame there is a definite legacy mystique and an “our beach, go home” vibe which determines even hall assignments with preference given to legacy donors.
If college is to prepare you for real life, then my private school kid is seeing a much different picture of the world than does my public school kid. At DS’s public school, he started at ground zero and is doing phenomenally well. He doesn’t see any barriers in his way. While my DD’s experience at her private school has been far different. As she walks around ND campus with name-on-the-building legacies, she sees the reality that hard work and talent can only get you so far, being well connected open other doors.
“While the power of the nudge varied, the average was that legacy boosted acceptance rate by 23-45 percentage points. I read that to mean that a 10% chance (based on the credentials) applicant gets boosted to a 33-55% chance of acceptance at the legacy school. While many/most legacies would still get rejected, that level of boost is huge. Perhaps not quite as huge as being an athlete or an URM, but close.”
Percentage points? Or percent lift? Two very different things. There is a huge difference between a 50% lift (meaning that the 10% goes to 15%) and a 50 percentage point lift (meaning that the 10% goes to 60%).
“as she walks around ND campus with name-on-the-building legacies, she sees the reality that hard work and talent can only get you so far, being well connected opens other doors”
Didn’t hard work enable the donors who are donating these buildings to obtain the money needed to donate at that level?
Yes, of course, PG but that hard work wasn’t accomplished by the kids she’s walking next to. My point being, they were given admission preference because of who their parents are. I don’t begrudge them that and neither does she.
Legacies can be deserving, you know. I know quite a few ND legacies who were still fully deserving of admissions. Legacy wasn’t raising the dead. So I think it’s unfair for you to charge that the legacy kids she’s walking next to weren’t hard workers. You don’t know.
All I know is that the legacies who get into places like HYPMC from our high school, usually also get into at least one other of the equivalents. They all have had sky high SAT scores well into the 75%ile for these schools and are in the top 5% of the class.
Look, I’m not saying that legacies aren’t deserving, just that they get admission preference at schools where that’s important. I don’t begrudge them that and you’re taking what I said out of context. It was a commentary on the different perspectives my kids see of the real world in the microcosm of college life. At my DS’s public school, he gets a fair shot at it all notwithstanding our SES. He met the HR director of a Big Four accounting firm, was invited to intern and he’s been afforded other such top opportunities while at school. For him, legacy status or alumni donations never played a role in his being admissions to his school of choice and he’s a happy camper. Whereas, my DD exists in a community where SES is almost, not all, but almost everything that’s important for success. Where daddy went to ND and mommy went to Saint Mary’s and grandad is the benefactor of a merit scholarship in his name. It’s ok, it was her choice, it’s just that she’s noting that these kids will get a better bite at the better apples.
Mathmom and Pizzagirl – take a look at the Hurwitz study. It really nails it given how the study is structured.
Sure the typical legacy kid is well qualified. So too are thousands and thousands and thousands of non-legacy applicants. These days, well qualified is merely necessary but far from sufficient to get admitted to the most selective schools.
He studied 62,000 kids who applied to multiple schools among the 30 COFHE members (Ivy, NESCAC, MIT, Stanford, Duke, WUSTL, Chicago etc.). That’s a ton of data that swamps any our our personal anecdotal evidence.
“I estimate that the odds of admission are multiplied by a factor 3.13 due to legacy status.”
That’s HUGE. That turns a 15% chance of admission into a 47% chance of admission. That’s an add of 32% percentage POINTS. Not a 32% increase, which would only be 15% to 20%. Way way bigger.
So a smart Williams legacy kid who applies to Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams might still get in at Dartmouth or Amherst. But he’ll have (on average) a much much easier time getting into Williams than a non-legacy applicant to Williams with the exact same qualifications.
The flawed-logic argument is to say there’s no advantage because legacies are well qualified. Dummies don’t get in unless there’s perhaps name-on-the-building donations. But since these schools turn down most well qualified applicants, the legacy boost is very significant. Legacies get 3 ping pong balls in the hopper per application while equally qualified non-legacies get only one.
You can try to say that that is “only” a tie-breaker or a feather but it is statistically much more significant than that.