I think the point between legacies and donors is that the vast majority of legacies are “plain vanilla” legacies - the parents give a few hundred bucks every now and then, but they aren’t putting their names on buildings. To me, it’s critical to distinguish between plain vanilla legacy and name-on-the-library legacy … and frankly name-on-the-library legacy is indistinguishable from name-on-the-library non-legacy, because when you’re handing out $100 million checks, Grateful U couldn’t care less whether you, personally, went there or not.
I have an acquaintance (sorority sister, but not someone I was close to) who, with her husband (also an alum) gave $40 MM to our alma mater. I fully believe that kind of money should buy her X number of admission tickets that she should be able to pass on to family and friends.
Notre Dame is about 25% legacy students. That’s a lot.
The overwhelming majority of those are not name-on-the-building types. They are kids of doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc. One percenters (about $400k income) but not 0.1 percenters. Call them “lower upper class” or “upper upper middle class.” They drive Audis not Ferraris. They aren’t donating buildings, but they are full paying at $60k per year per kid.
ND is over 50% full pay. Legacies are a big part of helping them hit that budget item, along with high selectivity.
^ This! thank you Northwesty for adding forensic data to what is common knowledge. That a kid with above average stats and no legacy status stands at a complete disadvantage next to another kid with the same stats but whose family can afford to add to the obscenely high endowment fund of these elitist schools.
Interesting and appreciated feedback all, although we seem to have veered a bit from the original question? Is legacy status still important if parents haven’t donated? Very interested in thoughts on this.
I’ll have to look at the study, but this statement doesn’t make much sense. A person who can get into Amherst as a non-legacy doesn’t need much help to get into Williams. Does the study identify a bunch of legacies who only got into the legacy school, but were rejected by all comparable schools?
Legacy edge and mega donor pull are two different things. How many multimillion dollar donor families have a kid in the freshman class? a) there aren’t that many. b) they aren’t all applying in the same year. c) once those kids are through, it takes a while to produce the next generation of college applicants.
Some put more gloss on legacy than it deserves. Not to mention the continued belief stats are the only qualifier.
@SalveMater, I don’t get this: “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.” Are you saying that legacy kids can choose dorms? If so, my D’s roommate should be rather peeved. Both of roommate’s parents are graduated from ND, yet these girls got the smallest room in the dorm.
how could anyone know that? without data it would just be circumstantial evidence. But in my opinion, I think schools decide this on a case by case basis, having more to do with whether or not the non-donor legacy has the “it” factor that that particular school is looking for in that particular class, and how many such applicants it’s reviewing. But logically, I think it goes without saying that if you have two applicants that are apples for apples, and you have one spot left in your class, aren’t you more inclined to reward your donor legacy, even if the other has a slightly upperhand? It wouldn’t be prudent to discourage donors by turning away their kids for non-donors’ kids now would it? I mean elite schools are in business to grow endowments after all.
I often think we’re naive on CC. Not only all this time looking in the wrong directions for an edge, but assuming the kids who got in had to have had some magic wand.
Yes, a legacy can have an advantage even without donations. But not “just” because his stats are already high and some parent or grandparent went there. Not because there is some assumption all legacies from top schools are wealthy, will be full pay and will give back big money. I’ll put this bluntly: most kids don’t know a school beyond rankings, the names of some majors. Even their reasoning about why they want a certain major is limited. Few have gone well beyond “wanting” to study X or be a Y when they grow up. In theory (and often in the app,) the kids who are legacy will know the college better, what sort of experience it offers, more than lines on a page.
@suzy100 no, students aren’t given a choice, but the kids say that it’s common knowledge that there’s nothing random about how students are grouped together and some halls are known as the the rich kids dorms. Whether one old drafty building is better than the next, I wouldn’t know, but it’s definitely not done by random selection. My DD’s BF is in his dad’s old hall,so maybe if your daddy was a neurosurgeon and lived in Seigfried then so will you?
Well, my double legacy kid got one of the tiniest rooms I’ve ever seen in my life, barely enough room to turn around, so they must have missed the memo that says that his parents were Very Very Important (tongue in cheek, since we aren’t).
Is there a place to see the Hurwitz study for free?
Without having seen it, I can imagine a couple of scenarios:
- There are a lot of kids who apply to eight highly selective colleges, and are accepted by two or three of them. If the legacy school is highly likely to be one of the two or three, that suggests to me that legacy advantage is real, but I have trouble seeing much of a problem with it.
- There are a lot of kids who apply to eight highly selective colleges, and are accepted only by the legacy school. This would be much more suggestive, especially if those kids were rejected by schools that are less selective than the legacy school.
I’m not convinced that you can control for enough factors to really compare students who were accepted/rejected at a specific college, and claim to tease out the legacy effect.
I should also note that a lot of legacy kids apply early. If they get in, you may not know how they would have done at comparable colleges.
My kid is just at state u but he has a nice big dorm because he’s an RA
@Hunt post #85 resonates with me. That’s been our personal experience and the experience of kids we know.
In retrospect, the best thing that happened to my oldest kid in his college admission process, though it didn’t feel like it at the time, was that he was deferred ED from brown as a legacy. His SAT scores put him into the top 25% of applicants his class year, and his other stats and ECs (which included 3 competitive application process summer science research lab placements…his IT factor combined with Shakespearean acting at a college well known for its program) were strong. Brown accepted no one from his school ED his year, which was an anomaly.
Why was it a good thing he got deferred, and accepted RD? Because he was accepted RD (when acceptance percentiles are most competitive) to peer schools where he had no hook, such as uchicago, Penn, WUSTL, and also at 2 NESCAC schools (Wesleyan and tufts, and he didn’t apply to HYPSM) which made him feel like he belonged at brown, that he wasn’t simply accepted because of his legacy status, but rather for what he brought to the table. In fact, some neighborhood (& might I add obnoxious) kids and parents who were ranked obsessed thought it was nuts that he didn’t attend uchicago or Penn, and had the audacity to tell us.
In my experience with the legacy kids we know who have gotten into highly selective schools, all had the stats & an IT factor to do so. I think the legacy card helps those kids who present a strong profile. And no doubt, it helps them when they’re compared to a non- legacy with similar stats, although I have read that legacies are a distinct pool that are compared to one another in the process. But I whole heartedly agree with what I’ve read on this site: non-big-donor legacy, which includes my family, can’t raise someone from the dead. The kid has to have the stats or ain’t it happening.
Hurwitz’s study is hard to find. I haven’t been able to locate it. The Crimson had a review of it and noted that he wasn’t at liberty to say if Harvard was one of the schools, or not.
Re: the point above, one thing about looking at it across schools is that its quite possible that there is a Tufts syndrome component here where Brown might reject a Yale legacy with the credentials such that he’s quite likely to be admitted to Yale. Unless they see some reason to believe that the applicant would choose them over the legacy school, there’s probably another candidate that will give them a slight boost in their yield number. Its a little hard to believe that they would parse it that finely, but its not impossible.
Ha, Salvemater - my kid was an RA too - that’s when he finally got a nice room! It made up for the other 3 hell-holes!
I think Hunt’s point is well-taken - the legacy kids I know invariably applied ED (as my own did), so who knows if they would have gotten into similar-caliber schools. I really don’t know if my son would have, only because he happened to apply ED to the “highest caliber” school on his list – his other choices were all great schools, but a bit lower on the totem pole of rankings.
My kids both applied SCEA to Yale, and withdrew all their other applications when they got in. We know my son would have had a nice scholarship to Pitt, and we know that my daughter could have gone to Wesleyan–because she sent her withdrawal message to Wesleyan College in Georgia instead of Wesleyan University. D’oh!
I can’t find Hurwitz for free. But here’s the abstract and conclusions:
“In this paper, I examine the impact of legacy status on admissions decisions at 30 highly selective colleges and universities. Unlike other quantitative studies addressing this topic, I use conditional logistic regression with fixed effects for colleges to draw conclusions about the impact of legacy status on admissions odds. By doing so, I eliminate most sources of outcome bias by controlling for applicant characteristics that are constant across colleges and college characteristics that are constant across applicants. I estimate that the odds of admission are multiplied by a factor 3.13 due to legacy status. My results also suggest that the magnitude of this legacy admissions advantage depends greatly on the nature of the familial ties between the applicant and the outcome college, and, to a lesser extent, the selectivity of the outcome college and the applicant’s academic strength.”
"Legacy status increases the odds of admissions. 
Traditional analytic techniques underestimate the true impact of legacy status. The legacy admissions advantage is found across the student ability spectrum. The legacy admissions advantage occurs in colleges of varying selectivity. The legacy admissions advantage is further enhanced through early admissions programs.
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ918731
The study uses data for 60,000 applicants applying to several of these top 30 colleges. That’s very rich data.
At highly selective colleges, most candidates are very well qualified and pretty indistinguishable from each other. A 1200 SAT isn’t going to get you into the lottery at Harvard unless you are an athlete, URM or development case (legacy or not).
Probably 80% of Harvard acceptances are to kids who Harvard could accept or not. Harvard is drowning in applications from kids with 1400+ SAT scores and high GPAs. The legacy preference doesn’t get you into the lottery. But it really really increases the likelihood that you will win the lottery. By like 3X. Legacies get more ping pong balls per application than non-legacy kids.
Said another way, most kids that get into Harvard get accepted by winning in the “tie-breaker” bracket. So having a card that “only” serves as a tie-breaker is actually extremely strong. In this way, the legacy boost functions differently than the boost given to athletes and URMs.
“Interesting and appreciated feedback all, although we seem to have veered a bit from the original question? Is legacy status still important if parents haven’t donated? Very interested in thoughts on this.”
It varies school by school. Some places it counts, other places it makes no difference. At my alma mater, they tell you it makes absolutely zero difference. Other schools do track donations and other involvement mostly as a way to determine good alumni citizenship, and they only give the legacy treatment to kids of good citizens.
But at all schools the level of donations coming from the vast majority of plain vanilla legacy families is modest.
Name-on-the building donations are a completely different thing (whether coming from legacies or not).