<p>You have ONE child attending BOTH schools at the same time? :eek:</p>
<p>re-read my response.</p>
<p>and do twins count? and yes I have seen examples ONE attending Harvard and ONE attending podunk state U."</p>
<p>Even your two daughters don't correlate well the voodoo statistics you keep on insisting.</p>
<p>""But those who are admitted with lower SAT scores do worse compared to their non-legacy peers who were also admitted despite low scores, the study found."</p>
<p>and the study even refutes your assertions that SAT don't mean a squat.</p>
<p>If their SAT's were lower their college GPA is lower.
What if their HS GPA was lower, does this corelate with lower college GPA as well (if SAT's are not lower)? </p>
<p>A URM with a lower SAT might not be a valid comparison point as many of these students might not have 1st language English, or parents with 1st language English....Hard work might not be the difference..</p>
<p>The DailyPrincetonian article gives a little insight into the methodology:</p>
<p>They looked at students whose SAT scores were below average for the institution in question.
[quote]
In the course of their study, Massey and Mooney took students' self-reported SAT scores at each school and compared them to those schools' average SAT scores. If students' SAT scores were lower than their schools' average score, then their status as either a minority, child of an alum or athlete was considered to have been a factor in their admission.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So presumably if a student had a below average SAT score and was not a minority, athlete or legacy, that student would have been excluded from the study. </p>
<p>I wonder if there were many legacy athletes, and/or legacy minorities, and how were these individuals classified? </p>
<p>I also wonder about the numbers, ie were there enough legacies with below average SAT scores to be statistically significant. </p>
<p>The simple explanation (someone already hinted at this) would be that when minorities or athletes are admitted to a selective school with below average SAT scores they are usually provided with academic support in the form of special programs, advisers, and tutors. A legacy with below average SAT scores would be less likely to receive this type of support.</p>
<p>Of course the alternate theory (these studies often seem to have an agenda) would be that legacies are lazy and unmotivated and accustomed to being given more than they deserve and shouldn't have been admitted in the first place.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The simple explanation (someone already hinted at this) would be that when minorities or athletes are admitted to a selective school with below average SAT scores they are usually provided with academic support in the form of special programs, advisers, and tutors. A legacy with below average SAT scores would be less likely to receive this type of support.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>My take is that low-SAT legacies must be assumed to bring something extra to the college, since not all legacies are admitted. Presumably, they are, ceteris paribus, from a wealthy background, with parents who, so colleges hope, will make large donations to the college. Presumably, too, the legacies have had tutors, etc... available to them before college, and access to private tutors while in college. As well, most support services are available to all students. These include bureaus of study services, writing and math centers, and many other services for struggling students. </p>
<p>The study looks only at low-SAT legacies and does not make a blanket statement about the worthiness of legacies more generally.</p>
<p>My hunch is there is a simpler explanation. In the aggregate, legacies are more likely to have gone to strong secondary schools than are URMs and athletes. (At many top schools, the athletes tend to come from less affluent families than those of the student bodies as a whole.)They are more likely to have had tutoring when they ran into trouble at school. They are highly likely to have parents who valued education, who read to them when they were little, who bought dictionaries and encyclopedias, who had learning disabilities found and dealt with. They are more likely to have parents who had high expectations for academic performance. They are more likely to have taken a prep course for the SAT. Some athletes and URMs have parents who did not attend college themselves; all legacies have at least one college-educated parent. URMs, at least, are more likely to come from homes where a language other than English is spoken. </p>
<p>Legacies are, in short, students who have been given most possible advantages in life. In most cases, it is highly unlikely that these kids will "bloom" in college. It does happen; I'm not denying that, but it's rarer. </p>
<p>The kid who is a URM who has always spoken something other than English at home, spoken Spanish or another language in his own community and attended a less than stellar high school, may suddenly experience a sharp increase in English vocabulary when he finds himself immersed in an English-only environment, associating with classmates who have better English vocabularies, reading more in English, etc. I would think athletes would be sort of half way in between. </p>
<p>The results of the study simply correlate with an old saw that was true in my day. Freshman year grades, and especially first semester grades, at top colleges tend to reflect the quality of the high school you attended. But, after the first year, the playing field levels out a lot. The kids who entered having never written a research paper or taken an essay exam have learned how to do those things. The kids who struggled when they were assigned 250 pages of reading a week in one course have increased their reading speed through practice and learned other study skills they were never taught. Those kids are more likely to show substantial improvement in the level at which they are performing academically than are the legacies.</p>
<p>There is likely to be a real difference between a legacy who scores a 1300 on the SAT and a kid who grew up with two blue-collar parents and got the same score. It is more likely that the latter will bloom in college when exposed to greater resources.</p>