<p>The Times has an article on yet another study that shows that legacies (i.e. applicants whose parents attended the college to which they are applying) are more likely to get in than other students: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/09legacies.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/09legacies.html</a></p>
<p>The researcher conducting the study tried to isolate the importance of legacy status, by examining students who had applied to more than one selective institution (one of which he had a legacy at), the theory being that since the exact same student with the exact same statistics was applying to both schools, the only difference between his admissions chances should be the legacy status. The researcher told the Times:</p>
<p>"I was able to take into account all the applicants characteristics, Mr. Hurwitz said, because they were the same at every school they applied to. About the only thing that would be different was their legacy status.</p>
<p>Of course, that's simply not true. The legacy status is not the only thing that would be different, because each of the schools would have a different applicant pool and different criteria. Unfortunately, it's impossible to truly do cross-comparisons of each school's individual holistic admissions process. </p>
<p>Still, it was a valiant attempt and it yielded significant results. According to the Times:</p>
<p>"Applicants to a parents alma mater had, on average, seven times the odds of admission of nonlegacy applicants. Those whose parents did graduate work there or who had a grandparent, sibling, uncle or aunt who attended the college were, by comparison, only twice as likely to be admitted."</p>
<p>It's not just legacies who get have a higher chance of admission, of course:</p>
<p>We did a paper that found that if you are an athlete, you have 4.2 times the likelihood of admission as a nonathlete, he said. The advantages for underrepresented minorities are pretty big, too.</p>
<p>And it's not necessarily undeserved:</p>
<p>On average, Mr. Hurwitzs study found, legacy applicants had slightly higher SAT scores than others. Education researchers point out that students whose parents attended elite colleges are also more likely to have advantages like family wealth and private school education.</p>
<p>Most interestingly, though, was that the magnitude of the legacy preference varied greatly among the different elite schools in the study:</p>
<p>"Among the 30 colleges, the legacy advantage varied enormously: one college was more than 15 times as likely to accept legacy applicants, while at another, the effect was insignificant.</p>
<p>As a condition of access to the data, Mr. Hurwitz said, he agreed not to identify the colleges.</p>
<p>Given a table showing characteristics like high endowments and SAT scores and low acceptance rates, it seemed apparent that they are the members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, a group made up of the Ivy Leagues and two dozen other private research universities and liberal arts colleges."</p>
<p>So it's a somewhat flawed study telling us what we already know, but at least it gives the Times something to write about!</p>