How much does Legacy/Donations matter in the process?
No body can quantify that. It also depends on how much boost you need.
Legacy can help differentiate you among equally stellar applicants, but it will not make up for a weakness in your profile.
Here’s the dirty secret: if your family has a history with the development office’s major gifts team, then you might be on the short-list. This is their own description, but who knows what the actual minimum is: “Cultivate and solicit alumni and parent prospects, with emphasis on gifts of $100,000 or more.”
So like if you donated upwards of 5 million dollars you should be ok?
It is a sliding scale, the less qualified the student is, the more millions in donations would be required.
If you personally have $5M, you can certainly donate it and find out. 
But here’s the thing. Colleges are interested in development cases over time. They are astute enough to recognize a first time $10M (which I believe to be the real number we should be talking about) “gift” in the same year as their kid is applying for what it is. Penn will not do a quip pro quo, IMO. They will very happily take the money, but you will get nothing (other than a tax write-off) in return.
Which is not to say that an applicant’s file would not get a very close look if the parents have a building named after them - it will get a second or third look. But Penn, or its peers, will not admit someone whose qualifications are at least somewhat in the ballpark.
No I’m saying if the total has come to a couple millions of dollars over like 40 years and the student is qualified for penn
@Harrison28 Your family would need to be in some kind of contact with someone from development who puts your name on the List. However, this usually works the other way around, at least according to rumors.
Realistically, there is no “donating-to-guaruntee-a-spot” without some kind of influential background. Most of the examples come from billionaires who sit on the board. Eg, Trump’s children, Huntsman’s, Perelman’s, etc.
@aoeuidhtns I was curious about what you wrote in #2 above. So I simply googled “Major Gifts Penn” and the following job posting came up. Surprised to see what you wrote word for word:
https://jobs.hr.upenn.edu/postings/30110
However I doubt that a 100K gift would really mean much to them. They probably see lots of those types of gifts each year. I don’t think they get excited until the number reaches 7 figures.
@sgopal2 More like 8 or 9 figures.