<p>If a parent has a graduate degree (e.g. MBA, JD, PhD) from Yale, would that still give the child legacy status? Or is legacy status for Yale College only applicable if the Parent is an alumni of Yale College (BA)?</p>
<p>Yale's supplement to the Common App requests information on all Yale degrees earned by family members. <a href="http://www.yale.edu/admit/freshmen/application/pdf/yale_supplement_paper.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.yale.edu/admit/freshmen/application/pdf/yale_supplement_paper.pdf</a></p>
<p>So it looks like Yale will at least consider your parents' graduate degrees. The common wisdom at most colleges, though, is that the most potent legacy preference goes to an applicant whose parent received an undergraduate degree at the college in question. And in any case, the legacy advantage at Yale is not very strong.</p>
<p>For any college the application itself is usually indicative of how interested a school is in legacies and what constitutes a legacy for that school. In this case, since Yale uses the Common App, look also at the Yale supplement. Yale's supplement asks detailed questions about Yale relationships, including about non-parent relatives who attended Yale. Harvard's supplement, in contrast, asks for nothing beyond what is asked about parents in the Common App.</p>
<p>For those schools that participate in the Common Data Set (Yale, in this case, but not Harvard, for example), question C7 asks colleges to rank the relative importance of various factors in their admissions decisions for freshmen, including what is called "Alumni/ae relation" or the legacy relationship. This is also a good guide as to whether legacy is considered and if so, how important it is in admissions decisions.</p>
<p>Question C7 also asks about the "Level of applicant's interest" or what is sometimes called "expressed interest". If a school says "interest" matters in its admissions decisions, this question can be important if the school offers early decision or, in Yale's case, single choice early action. Yale legacies who opt to apply early elsewhere are not expressing as much interest as legacies who choose to apply early to Yale. Yale says it does care about the applicant's level of interest.</p>
<p>Yes, Yale's CDS says that the university "considers" legacy status. But the preference for legacies is not strong at Yale. Just ask the legions of Yale legacies who have been denied admission.</p>
<p>And yes, the CDS does say that the level of an applicant's interest is "considered." I have not been able to figure that one out, since visiting students are not even asked to fill out a visitor card at the admissions office. Maybe you're right that Yale is talking about the "interest" a student (legacy or non-legacy) expresses by applying EA.</p>
<p>Here's the CDS, if anyone's interested. Common</a> Data Set</p>
<p>From what I can tell, applying early if a college has an early admissions program of any kind is considered a real expression of interest. Campus visits are generally not, since many schools make no effort to track them, not just Yale.</p>
<p>I am a little skeptical about those "legions of Yale legacies who have been denied admission". For one thing, schools that get over 25,000 applications obviously get a large "n" of just about every category of applicant and so even Yale can still bias admissions in favor of legacies without lowering its academic standards. </p>
<p>And when looking at acceptance stats of CC applicants to colleges it is clear to me that not all students (or their parents) reveal URM, recruited athlete or legacy status. At one point I recognized my niece posting on CC. She posted her accepted stats for a school in the HYPSM group, but did not admit in that post or elsewhere that she was a double parent legacy at that school. </p>
<p>I assume that a certain percentage of CCers are legacies but, like my niece, do not reveal that information. The disappointed legacies and their parents may be more likely to post about their disappointment.</p>