<p>What does legacy status do for an applicant at Yale?
What if the student is a legacy, but the family never donated money to the college?</p>
<p>Lots of threads about this. Do a search for extensive discussion. </p>
<p>Legacies are accepted at a higher rate that non-legacies. Some cite this as proof of a clear legacy advantage. Others point out that legacies have genetic and environmental advantages that explain their higher admissions rates (and believe that H and P legacies would do similarly well in the Y admissions process for those reasons). Both camps fervently believe their positions.</p>
<p>Everyone agrees that there are different types of legacies and that they are treated differently–ranging from legacies whose parents have never donated to those whose families have give hundreds of millions. Everyone agrees that whatever weight is given to legacy status goes up when major cash is involved.</p>
<p>Most of the legacy advantage is conferred by the genetic/environmental reasons you mention since the objective stats of legacy applicants are significantly stronger than the general applicant pool. A friend in the P development office told me that donations mean nothing unless they are so large that admissions doesn’t need to call the development office to find out how much you gave (suffice to say “hundreds of millions” would do it). My guess is that H and P legacies would not do similarly well in Y admissions (or any other HYP combination) because these schools do care about yield rate and someone good enough to get into your college is good enough to get into the equally outstanding legacy college and more likely to go there. As such, an H or P legacy might be an “anti-hook” at Y but then you do have the “Why Yale” essay. If this were true, you could get around the “anti-hook” by applying ED to schools like Penn or Brown. It would be interesting to see if ED applicants have relatively more success than RD candidates based on peer legacy status or not.</p>