Legacy...Why is it so important?

<p>Assume you graduate at 22 and get married at 38 with a first kid at 40. Assume you donate (small at first but eventually pretty significantly) and your kid at 18 (your 58 and have donated for 36 years to the school) applies to P-ton. Should the legacy 1500 SAT kid have an advantage? It should be a 'factor' in admissions, not an entry ticket, which I believe is their policy. The policy keeps the school's academic standards high and reinforces long term giving from alums.</p>

<p>At my school, two strong legacies got deferred. It's not as big of an influence, as you guys think it is.</p>

<p>I'll go out on a limb and say that, aside from financial concerns, one of the things that makes the great colleges great is that they are able to maintain about 10-14% legacies in the student body. Admitting children of alumni fosters a sort of institutional memory that is invaluable. You get incoming students with a higher than average familiarity with the campus, the traditions, and the spirit of the university...who can then share that enthusiasm and knowledge with their fellow classmates, which creates a better community for all. This is especially true for Princeton, which must be doing something right, since it has the highest alumni giving rate in the nation, and the best reunions as well. </p>

<p>Most legacies are very well qualified academically, of course.</p>

<p>I agree with tiger08 and wsox. It's "a 'factor' in admissions, not an entry ticket, which...is their policy." I also know very strong, legacy candidates that got deferred and/or rejected.</p>

<p>oh well. do u guys know if Pton is all that need blind or is it just for namesake that they are?</p>

<p>Last year, legacies were admitted at a 40% rate - more than three times higher than the rate for non-legacies. </p>

<p>Legacies were far more likely to accept when offered admission: the yield rate was 88%, far higher than the yield rate on non-legacy admits.</p>

<p>Legacies constituted 9% of the applicants, but 14% of the matriculants for the Class of 2008.</p>

<p>if there are two applicants that are equally qualified, one a legacy and the other not, they are going to accept the legacy. its a win-win situation for the institution really, because they get just as much talent and more donations. and when all the applicants are 1500+ SAT, straight A students, little advantages like that can go a long way. i got deferred, and i really dislike the unfair advantage, but if i ran a university, i think i would do the exact same thing.</p>

<p>It is a rationalization to say that large numbers of "equally qualified" people were rejected. If they were, in fact, "equally qualified" they wouldn't have been rejected at a rate three times higher. Obviously, Princeton (and other schools) view legacy status as a "super qualification" and give legacy applicants an absolutely huge edge in admissions.</p>

<p>Don't tell me these advantaged legacy admits were more "qualified" (except in the accident of their birth) or even "equally" qualified as the number - perhaps three times as large - of rejected applicants who had an SAT score higher than that of the legacy median.</p>

<p>Thanks for at least putting "qualified" in quotation marks. It's such a vague, abstract term. What may be "qualified" to me or "qualified" to you may not be the same as "qualified" to them. We'll never know...until we infiltrate the system and become spies, relaying the information back to grateful future generations of college applicants :D</p>

<p>Need to factor all these analyses by the realization that the vast majority of legacies apply ED (therefore no surprise that the accept rate is high). Average ED accept rate = 32%; average legacy rate = 40%. Not so big a difference.</p>

<p>Less to that response than meets the eye.</p>

<p>First, there is no evidence that the legacies' median SAT score was higher or evan "equal to" that for hundreds of rejected ED applicants.</p>

<p>Second, assuming that legacies constituted one third of the ED admits (as opposed to 14-15% of total matriculants,) that would still mean - at a minimum, that legacy applicants were TWICE as likely to be admitted as non-legacy applicants, EVEN THOUGH the latter group presumably contains a generous fraction of highly sought-after URMs and athletic recruits!!!</p>

<p>Last year, one of my classmates (from fairly competitve school in MD), got deferred early, then rejected. Everyone was surprised; he was a legacy many, many times over, parents donated alot of money, and plus, he was incredibly smart, albeit numbers driven. He didn't have really great people skills, and I don't know about his essays, though as far as grades/standardized tests go he was top notch (1600, 800 x3, etc). So I'm assuming that although having a legacy does play a significant role, the admissions officers probably look for someone more well rounded and with a interesting personality (from essays, interview, extra curriculars, etc). </p>

<p>That same year, another student, who was a stellar XC runner (#2 or 3 in state, all-state team, etc) was recruited, and her stats weren't nearly as good (mid 1400s, avg. GPA). I guess having an athletic or academic hook is more substantial and more likely to help an applicant than a legacy.</p>

<p>Being a recruited athlete is an even bigger "hook" (in terms of the admission rate relative to other qualifications) than legacy or URM status.</p>

<p>Nevertheless, your anecdotal evidence about knowing a legacy that was rejected is just that - a story not at all typical of the "fate" awaiting a sizable fraction of legacies.</p>

<p>After all, even if a disproportionately large fraction of them were admitted - 40% - it is also true that 60% of them were rejected. (90% or more of non-legacies were similarly rejected.)</p>

<p>I think that a large part of the discrepancy between the admit rates for legacies and general admit rates can be boiled down to the fact that people who graduate from Princeton (and schools like it) are people who will make efforts to educate their children. I have never seen the following done and do not have the requisite data to do it myself, but I would hypothesize that if someone ran the numbers on Princeton legacies admitted to Princeton and Harvard and Yale legacies admitted to Princeton, those numbers would show far more similarity to each other than the numbers for Princeton legacies and those for the average population do. Whatever discrepancy remains between the former two sets of numbers I believe is fair to call favoritism (tempered perhaps slightly with the observation that a qualified applicant with a legacy at a top school is more likely to pick that school than another school of the same caliber).</p>

<p>That's interesting...I never thought about legacy admissions that way.</p>

<p>And as my own random anecdote...there was a girl who had a triple-legacy at Yale who got rejected from Yale. Very smart, good stats, good grades, and at least one awesome EC: she worked at NASA and advanced very far in both Siemen's Westinghouse and Intel STS.</p>