With all of the advantages that Princeton legacies tend to have (typically much higher parent SES level), they should have had the maximum possible opportunities to maximize the high school academic qualifications that they present to colleges, unlike many other high school students. @Data10 can probably present Harvard-lawsuit-related information about how Harvard legacies compare to other Harvard applicants and admits in various SES, academic, and other characteristics.
Giving legacy preference is like adding privilege to existing advantage.
And I would remind you (and everyone else) that the College Confidential forums attract a very nonrepresentative sample of high school students and their parents. The experiences and observations of those posting here cannot be taken as representative of the educational sector as a whole.
Some of these comments are getting a bit snarky. Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
Additionally, “College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
If these low-stat kids went into MIT aiming to major in CS or premed (track), they’d likely have switched out within the first year.
Also, please don’t underestimate the mental health toll of being at the bottom of the academic curve for four straight years. The resulting loss of confidence (among other issues) can be truly life-changing/diminishing. I wouldn’t do this to my own children (unless it’s Brown, where you can take every class P/F).
Kids flunk out at Brown. The administration has ways of putting a nice spin on it- kids take a leave of absence, kids take medical leaves for unspecified anxiety, etc. But don’t kid yourself… I had friends who were on the “ten year plan”. You can take every class P/F, but you STILL need to get into grad school, STILL need to get a job, or otherwise launch… and that means keeping up academically.
My daughter attends Cornell and plenty of kids flunk out there as well. They have major grade deflation. Kids (Engineering mainly) come in having had straight A’s and for the first time in their lives get C’s. It’s a tough pill to swallow for some. Other majors are much easier. Worse for these kids they put the median grade for the class on your transcript. For some it has to be demoralizing when you know you’ve gotten below the median. The joke there is that Cornell is considered the easiest Ivy to get in but the hardest to stay in.
It takes a mental toll on a lot of students, something they really need to work on. Clubs are very competitive as well which is something these kids have not encountered before arriving there. But no one has ever told these kids before that it’s ok not to be perfect and that in life you will be rejected from more jobs than you will get, etc. I’ve never cared what grades my kids have gotten. My mantra is always as long as they’ve tried their best and are happy. That’s all I care about. I also don’t care where they go to school as far as prestige.
Getting lower grades in college is not unique to Cornell or any other college reputed to have “grade deflation” (really at most less grade inflation than peer colleges).
Colleges in general get mostly students who had 3.0-4.0 HS GPA and spread them across the 2.0-4.0 college GPA range (with a few doing worse and being academically dismissed). The most selective colleges get mostly students who had 3.8-4.0 HS GPA and spread them across the 3.0-4.0 college GPA range (with a few doing worse and earning more C grades than anything else, or even worse to get academically dismissed).
I agree with @ucbalumnus that Cornell doesn’t have grade deflation. It may possibly have less grade inflation in its engineering college than some of its peers.
This is primarily due to grade inflation in high schools. Too many kids these days are accustomed to inflated grades in high schools.
Legacy students may have better qualifications than the general population at top schools, but that is true of just about every group except one. Athletes have significantly lower stats at all of these schools (not picking on athletes here - they essentially have a full time job in high school) which brings down the average. If Legacies were better qualified than the non-athlete population, then the schools could just get rid of the preference and nobody would care.
I’m curious about the grade deflation comments - if a school actually has inflation/deflation, the median grade should reflect that. I’ve seen kids pick class sections based on the median grade. For example, in Prof Blue’s Class, the median is an A- but in Prof Green’s Class, the median is a B.
Grade deflation would imply that the overall median has decreased over time, while inflation would imply that the median has increased. Do we know anything specific about the medians at certain colleges? For example, is the Cornell engineering median lower than the median at MIT or Lehigh or some other engineering school?
There’s no grade deflation at any college. None. Inflation/deflation at a college is to be measured relative to its historical median GPAs. By that measure, all colleges have some degrees of grade inflation. Some more. Some less.
Additionally, one can’t compare median GPAs between different colleges, as their students and course rigors are different.
Cornell’s median’s change every semester because it’s based on a per class and you don’t know what it is until you get your grade. There have been plenty of classes my daughter has taken that the median has been a B or lower. She didn’t have to take Chemistry because she had a high enough AP score but that one was either a C or C-. Killed a lot of medical school dreams for some kids. Big ouch.
The flip side is she took a few Dyson courses and those medians were actually pretty high. So maybe those classes have some inflation. One she took the median was an A-, the other it was an A. The one with the A- the professor also let them retake tests. She couldn’t believe it as she said if they let us retake tests in Engineering we would all have high GPA’s too. She didn’t even retake any of those Exams and earned an A+ in that class without any retakes so not sure what that says about the course, the students, or if she should be studying Business instead? Lol
As for inflation, I am sure there is some inflation at our high school. Having 4 kids, I have seen over the course of 10 years at our school that although the Highest GPA for the valedictorian has remained pretty much the same, the top 10% and top 25% for weighted and unweighted GPA has crept up a little. Some of this I do attribute to the fact that there are more AP and Honors options than there were when my oldest attended as well as a new state requirement of a Civics class which meant helped or hurt a lot of kids depending if they had time gaps in their schedules. If you had time you could take a full year course of AP Gov, if you didn’t then you were stuck with a one semester course with would be a non Honors/AP thus hurt your GPA which is generally what would impact the highest kids who usually just had to squeeze it in somewhere.
Whoever previously mentioned parental pressure of higher grades, I don’t think it’s so much that as much as kids going and demanding retakes. That seems to be more of an issue. I think in retrospect a better way to also deal with things like rounding issues of 89.4 being a B+ vs A- or even an A in a non +/- system is for the percentage grades to be the GPA as opposed to the letter grade system. I’ve seen on here many schools do that and that would seem to be a more fair way to not only separate out kids but also deal with that issue. Our school doesn’t have A+ so a kid with a 99% earns the same grade as one with a 92.5% but that is a clear difference.
While it is hard to find colleges with actual grade deflation in the lists at the bottom of http://www.gradeinflation.com/ , there are some which do not appear to have recent grade inflation either. They appear to be mostly off-the-radar for most posters on these forums.
Some example stats for legacy vs non-legacy admit rate for Princeton’s class of 2022 are at https://pr.princeton.edu/pub/profile/PU-Profile-201819.pdf and summarized below. The Harvard lawsuit sample showed very similar legacy and non-legacy admit rates as Princeton during the sample period, as listed below.
Princeton Class of 2022 Admit Rate
Legacy Admit Rate = 217/684 = 32%
Non-Legacy Admit Rate = 1723/34686 = 5.0%
Princeton has stated that legacy is just a tie breaker and doesn’t have much impact, yet Harvard had similar legacy vs non-legacy stats in the lawsuit sample, and the lawsuit analyses all found that legacy offered a strong boost in chance of admission. That is among applicants who are in similar hook groups and received similar ratings by admission readers, the legacy applicant appeared to be far more likely to be admitted than non-legacy. Even when the legacy applicant received lower ratings than non-legacy applicant, he/she was still often far more likely to be admitted. Regression analysis done by the Plantiff’s expert, Harvard’s expert, and an unrelated Harvard internal analyses all came to a similar conclusion about this strong preference for legacies.
Some specific numbers about ratings in different sections of the application are at https://tyleransom.github.io/research/legacyathlete.pdf . Unfortunately this analysis does not separate legacy from LDC. However, legacies made up 63% of the LDC category and the other groups show a similar pattern, so it’s probably a decent representation. Non-LDCs admits appear to be rated significantly better than LDCs in every category expect athletic on average. Based on the Harvard freshman survey, admitted legacies may also have higher average SAT/ACT scores than non-legacies, even though their overall academic rating appears to have a lower average. It seems likely that athletics + test scores tend to be especially strong parts of the application for legacies.
Admitted White Students at Harvard
High Academic Rating – 78% of LDC, 89% non-LDC
High Alumni Interview Rating – 74% of LDC 87% of non-LDC
High Personal Rating – 70% of LDC, 84% of non-LDC
High Counselor LOR Rating – 62% of LDC, 76% of non-LDC
High Teacher LOR Ratings – 60% of LDC, 76% of non-LDC
High EC Rating – 56% of LDC, 73% of non-LDC
Interesting. This kind of info really debunks the idea that legacies are better qualified than other candidates. By this analysis they are less highly rated on almost every measure, yet they are admitted at a significantly higher rate than everyone else. It underscores the idea that those who are already privileged extend that privilege when it comes to college admissions.