<p>My grandfather and great-grandfather both attended Amherst. Does this qualify as legacy status, and how significant an advantage would it be? Does legacy still apply if you apply RD and not ED? Or are these all mysterious, unanswerable questions haha.</p>
<p>You still get a benefit, but not quite as much as if it was your father or mother who were graduates. An article in the NY times education section today actually tried to quantify this, and came up with an about 30% improvement in your chances if it’s your parents, but only about 15% (ie, from 14% chance of acceptance to 29% chance of acceptance) if it’s a relative other than your parents.</p>
<p>Shrages-that’s 100% (double)improvement according to your calculations. It actually is 30% of the 15%, so 19.5% for parents, and 17% for less closely related.</p>
<p>Wow, now I read the article, and the report is a 100% advantage-30% of legacy accepted compared to 15% overall applicant pool. Guess my Ss sister will be applying to Midd, along w/ Bates.</p>
<p>Mind you, there’s a decent amount of bias in that estimate. First of all, legacy kids are more likely than the average applicant to come from families whose values line up with Amherst’s (read: they’re likely to be better qualified to begin with). Also, the admissions department offers to meet with potential legacy applicants, and informally ‘counsels out’ those who would be unlikely to be accepted (basically softens the blow of rejection, as a courtesy to alumni parents [read: donors]). Thus, many the legacies who apply are the ones who’ve been pre-screened by admissions and given the green light on applying. So really, when you consider those factors, the direct causal impact of [non-development] legacy status seems pretty small.</p>