<p>I am a junior who is thinking about where I want to apply next year and was wondering if anyone knew how much legacy counts towards admission at Yale.</p>
<p>I have legacy that can be traced from 1837 and almost every generation of my family since including my uncle, grandfather & his brother, his dad and 2 brothers, etc. </p>
<p>I was wondering how much pull this would have at an institution such as yale. I am top of my class and will have taken 15 ap/ib classes receiving the IB diploma, so my merits are good as well, but I was wondering about the influence that a line of legacy like mine would have at Yale.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for your input, I appreciate it.</p>
<p>There is lots written on this on CC. The legacy bump at Yale these days is real but very modest. Some have likened it to be like a feather on the admissions scale between two otherwise matched applicants. Your grandfather legacy has some value but I have never heard that a “long lineage” means more than just having an alumni parent. One would expect that you could write a better “Why Yale?” essay than someone who was just applying to top schools on the USNWR list. </p>
<p>Although legacy applicants have a double digit acceptance rate, you should count on your other merits to get you in since most legacy applicants are rejected too. Those legacy applicants are not only stronger than the general Yale pool but for unclear reasons, even stat matched legacy matriculants obtain higher GPAs at Yale than non-legacies.</p>
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<p>I would further clarify that developmental admits, offspring of large donors, are expected to have a significant advantage in the admissions process. How much money needs to be donated to gain this status is unknown to me but I suspect it is in the $5 million plus range based on a friend that does developmental work at another Ivy school. Brenzel has been quoted as saying Yale rejects the majority of legacy children from families consistently giving in excess of $10K annually. If your long line of legacies traces you back to a Sterling or Harkness, then you can expect a significant admissions benefit.</p>
<p>I know kids whose legacy lines go back three generations, to their great-grandfathers, with multiple people in each generation, who were not accepted at Yale. Also people in the same position at Harvard and Princeton. (I don’t know anyone like that at Stanford, but that’s in large part because Stanford was still pretty new when current students’ great-grandparents were going to college. And of course no one at Stanford has a legacy that goes back to 1837.)</p>
<p>All of them were decent candidates for admission. Granted, none of them was at the top of his or her class, but the schools they went to (schools like Brearley and Exeter) should have made that unnecessary. (OK, they probably would have been admitted if they had been at the top of their classes there. Except one rejected Princeton legacy WAS at, or at least near, the top of her class at a famous school, and wound up going to Harvard.)</p>
<p>Legacies DO get admitted, it’s a positive on your application, especially if you are already a strong candidate. That’s probably the main effect: fewer strong legacy candidates get rejected than strong non-legacy candidates. But is would absolutely not be a waste of money for the OP to apply to some other colleges as well, and not just safeties. Unless she gets in to Yale SCEA.</p>
<p>@entomon When a student says their legacy at a particular school traces back to 1837, I don’t see any particular reason why that student should be applying to other schools (yes bad grades are not good).</p>
<p>Of course I do agree with JHS that is is not a guarantee, but having gone through the entire admissions process this year, I have a feeling Legacy means lots more than just good grades, scores and ECs.</p>
<p>Quote from a member of the Yale admissions committee: “Legacy helps – a little.” I would italicize the last 2 words to reproduce the emphasis if I could figure out how to do it!</p>
<p>It’s controversial. There was a panel discussion re this covered by the Times. Yale says 10 percent of admittees are legacies, down from 31 percent in 1939. Ten percent, to me, sounds like a significantly high number–although it obscures the fact that many of this group might have been admitted without the legacy tag. The Yale guy on the panelist said that legacies scored 20 points higher on the SAT. But another panelist said that 10 percent is misleadingly low, “pointing out that the figure for the class as a whole was skewed by other preferences, including those for athletes and underrepresented minorities.”</p>
<p>I think one reason for a relatively high legacy percentage is that legacies want to go to the school and apply at a high rate.</p>
<p>I used to think that legacy could counteract a modest deficiency in your application. I now think that it simply tips the scales between applicants with very similar qualifications.</p>