Well, it’s possible that the person in the back room at Yale is a saintly person interested only in crafting the best possible class without regard to finances. Indeed, I hope that it is true. It is also possible, though, that the person in the back room is a cigar-chomping operator who has been given the word to up the number of full-pays, while enabling Yale to maintain the position that it is need-blind. How could he do this? He could perhaps favor private school kids, or kids from particular zip codes, or (as you suggest) kids whose parents are in particular professions. This won’t be perfect, but he could perhaps look at data from the past to determine which categories of kids are more likely to be full-pay. It could well be that legacy families are much more likely to be full pay. Not all, of course–but what matters in this scenario is the likelihood.
I’m glad you think this isn’t happening. I hope you are right.
Oh jeez. It is so much easier to admit the kids from Atherton and Menlo Park and Winnetka than to have to use Legacy as a weak proxy for full pay. Adcom’s have evidence of full pay staring them in the face- why use the difficult and fuzzy signal when you’ve got the full throated scream right there?
There are kids living in Greenwich CT on free lunch and living in public housing. There are also kids in the HS whose parents are housekeepers and gardeners on big, 10 acre estates in Greenwich. Do you think the Adcom’s don’t realize who those kids are… i.e. not full payers, vs. the sons and daughters of the people who employ them??? And that in a pinch they can’t find Zillow?
We could admit a full class of full pays- right here on CC- without ever having to go to the legacy pool, if that’s what we wanted to do. Jeez.
Zip codes and city names are the worst predictor. There are a lot of great competitive applicants from certain cities- but what excites isn’t that that kid might be wealthy, it’s the individual accomplishments and presentation. And that first gen housekeeper’s kid may just be the bomb while the rich kid is yet another class president who blahblahblah. The use of the term “legacy preference” suggests the exciting kid will be side stepped for some richer, less exciting one.
You can’t tell anything from my zip code which includes public housing and million dollar houses. I really don’t know why Harvard, which could easily afford to make itself free to everyone for decades before they’d run out of money would care about parsing who is full pay. They know that if they approximately the same sort of kids year after year, they’ll get approximately the same percentage of full payers.
“No way is it about finding full payors-what are you assuming? That they go look like at your financials?”
They don’t have to. The demographics of the legacy pool take care of that. Every single legacy kid is not from a rich family. But that pool is as good a proxy for financial ability to pay as you could find and get away with using. Adding early admission to legacy makes that pool even better.
37% of Harvard legacy families are $500k annual income and above. So 37% percent of those kids come from the top 0.5% of incomes. Ding ding ding ding!.
A majority (likely a super-majority) easily come from the top 1% ($380k). Harvard will get some kids of teachers from their legacy pool, but year in/year out, they are going to get a lot of doctor/lawyer/banker/stockbroker kids too.
No school could get away with explicitly giving admissions preference to wealthier folks. So legacy is a nice Trojan horse for that. As is ED.
Harvard knows who’s a child of stockbrokers. The application includes that info. There’s no need for them to go to the legacy pool to admit the top 1%.
My point is that Harvard doesn’t need to “explicitly” give admissions preference to wealthier folks. (sorry to pick on Harvard today). Admit two more kids from each of Scarsdale, Chappaqua, Dover, New Canaan, Greenwich, Winnetka (etc.) than you did last year. By the time you’re done with the top 50 zip codes you’ve got 100 extra kids (with maybe five of them being the children of a firefighter married to a social worker), then just lop off 100 kids from the South Bronx and other low income areas and you’re done.
There’s not a single top tier university that needs to use legacy to move the scale towards the full payers. Not a one.
Math- my own zip code is diverse as well (public housing, homeless shelters, 5 bedroom “executive” homes). But our towns are a-typical. Why would Harvard go to the trouble of dealing with the backlash on Legacy (when the inevitable rejections occur) if it was JUST to admit more rich kids? You think Harvard can’t figure out who the rich kids are in the applicant pool? I was a lowly volunteer interviewer and even I could figure it out!!!
What do you think would happen to Harvard if they explicitly came out and said any of the following:
We give preference to private school kids over public school kids?
We give preference to doctor/lawyer kids over teacher kids?
We give preference to families that make over $400k a year in income?
They’d get strafed.
Instead, they say “we give preference to legacies who are part of the Harvard family and who will help us carry on our treasured traditions.”
Come on guys. There’s a reason that legacy and ED are routinely referred to as “affirmative action for rich people.”
Now Harvard is only about one third full pay. The financial explanation makes even more sense as you get into the Dukes and Notre Dames where (without the uber-endowment of Harvard) they need to be 50+% full pay year in, year out.
Do we know what the 30 schools are? I don’t think Hurwitz ever tells us in his paper. All he says is that it includes 8 private LACs and 12 private research universities, and that other researchers have used these same 30 schools.
If you spend a lot of time on CC and/or if you live in the Northeast, it might seem like everyone applies to all the most selective schools. That is less true in other parts of the country. The vast majority of students still attend college in their own home region. That’s true of Northeasterners as well as Midwesterners, Southerners, and Westerners. The difference is that Northeasterners have an abundance of excellent, highly selective private colleges in their home region. There are excellent, highly selective private colleges in other regions, too, just not nearly as many of them, and not nearly as many students in other regions attend highly selective private colleges, in- or out-of-region. So while it’s not at all uncommon for a top HS student in the Northeast to apply to 8 or 10 elite private colleges, likely most of them in the Northeast, that is much rarer among Midwesterners. Here in Minnesota, for example, rather small numbers of students end up at, or even apply to, elite private colleges, and even fewer at elite private colleges in the Northeast. A fairly common pattern for a top Minnesota public high school student would be to apply to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, fairly confident of admission, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison which functions as our “second flagship” because we enjoy tuition reciprocity. If that student wanted to add some private institutions, they’d likely look first at schools in the Midwest, e.g., some combination of Northwestern, Chicago, Notre Dame, Carleton, Macalester, and Grinnell, and then perhaps one or two out-of-region schools, e.g., Harvard and/or Stanford, which get more Minnesota applicants than any other out-of-region school. Not so much interest in the Browns, Dartmouths, Amhersts, etc., unless the student is a legacy at one of those schools (or perhaps is recruited to play hockey; we export some very good hockey players, though we try to keep the best of them at home). So if Hurwitz is looking at a consortium of Northeastern schools, our hypothetical Minnesota applicant might show up in his data set as having applied to only 1 school (Harvard) of the 30. That pattern isn’t unique to Minnesota, it’s generally true throughout the Midwest, with a partial exception for upscale Chicago-area students who seem to apply to Ivies in greater numbers. I’d wager it’s also true in most of the South, and most of the West apart from California. Most Californians stay in-state, but those who are willing to go out of state tend to apply pretty broadly.
Just to give you some sense of the orders of magnitude here: Minnesota with 5.5 million people is roughly the same size as Wisconsin (5.7 million), a bit smaller than Massachusetts (6.7 million) and quite a bit bigger than Connecticut (3.6 million). Here’s how many students from each of those states sent SAT score reports to Ivies in 2014:
Massachusetts: Harvard 2,430; Brown 2,391; Cornell 2,033; others <1,500 per school
Connecticut: Cornell 1,230; Yale 1,151; Brown 993; Penn 813; Columbia 781; Harvard 778; others <764 per school
Minnesota: Harvard 381; Princeton 285; Yale 246; Cornell 245; Dartmouth 186; Penn 172; Columbia 165; Brown 130
Wisconsin: Harvard 268; Princeton 209; Yale 174; Cornell 172; Brown 135; Columbia 125; Penn 122; Dartmouth 92
In fairness, the Minnesota and Wisconsin numbers might be somewhat understated; most students in those states take the ACT, not the SAT, and some Ivies will accept the ACT with writing as a substitute for both the SAT Reasoning and SAT Subject Tests. But Harvard says it “normally requires” SAT Subject Tests from all applicants, and Princeton says it “recommends but does not require” SAT Subject Tests regardless of whether the applicant submits ACT or SAT Reasoning Test scores, so I imagine almost all serious applicants to those schools submit SAT Subject Test scores, and show up in data on students sending SAT score reports.
“So if Hurwitz is looking at a consortium of Northeastern schools, our hypothetical Minnesota applicant might show up in his data set as having applied to only 1 school (Harvard) of the 30. That pattern isn’t unique to Minnesota, it’s generally true throughout the Midwest, with a partial exception for upscale Chicago-area students who seem to apply to Ivies in greater numbers. I’d wager it’s also true in most of the South, and most of the West apart from California. Most Californians stay in-state, but those who are willing to go out of state tend to apply pretty broadly.”
Yes. I concur completely. This kind of pattern that bclintonk describes is very common outside the Northeast. In Chicago, you could easily see a kid applying to only 1 of those 30 colleges because they’ve got UIUC as their backup. And unlike the Northeast, there would be no “shame” or gnashing of teeth or the-poor-thing-settled because everyone would know UIUC as a perfectly fine school.
Apparently that is right, because he excludes that group. But I can’t remember who had binding ED in that year. I recall a period where Harvard dropped ED, and was followed by others, but many schools at the lower end of the top tier kept it, which could impact the data. He also noted that ED applications were 14.1% legacy, compared to only 6.3% in the regular decision/early action process. .
Look, you can talk about derivations and deviations and what-not. But even if 37% of alums are that wealthy, not all of them have kids in the app pool in a given year.
No ding.
And earlier, someone quoted the admit percent rates of the 30 schools- looks like the range of admissions selectivity might be pretty broad. (I don;t find the original comment.) Are we really concerned if a school that admits/needs to admit a large percentage is giving some legacy tip?
“Oh jeez. It is so much easier to admit the kids from Atherton and Menlo Park and Winnetka than to have to use Legacy as a weak proxy for full pay. Adcom’s have evidence of full pay staring them in the face- why use the difficult and fuzzy signal when you’ve got the full throated scream right there?”
Easy. Because they CAN’T.
The school’s public and admired official policy is that admissions are done on a need blind basis. And also that the school meets the need of all accepted students.
But the school can still be need blind if they give preference to legacies and ED applicants.
Northwesty, if last year Yale admitted 5 kids from Horace Greely HS (I’m making these numbers up) and next year admitted 7 nobody would notice. It wouldn’t change their policy on need blind admissions and it wouldn’t upset the apple cart in any other way. The fact that the extra 2 kids are HIGHLY LIKELY to be full pay is of course, the “secret sauce” to using the kids own HS as a proxy for full pay. Why go to the trouble of messing around with legacies- some of whom are the sons and daughters of a social worker married to a pre-school teacher, when you can just add one or two more admits from Short Hills or Atherton???
It would be nice if we lived in a country where every single HS had the same percentage of kids on reduced school lunch or the same percentage of kids who are Pell eligible. But that’s not reality.
And I’m inclined to believe that Legacy is significantly less important than alumni believe, all else being equal.
A bit of each. But I agree with blossom. It’s silly to think they have to roundabout on full pay via legacy when they know the kid’s zip code and high school. It’s already a good bet that the kid from Kenilworth who goes to New Trier is full pay; no need to use legacy as a roundabout means to get there.
I personally think legacy status helped my kid insofar as we could articulate the institution’s values and ethos and help him communicate how he fit those and could add to the campus community - more so than an " outsider" might have been able. My company does consulting work for one of the schools of my alma mater and so I feel I have a good handle on their positioning, mission, character and values (though I had that handle before we got the project).