<p>This has nothing to do with me (and you'll be able to tell that from my post history) so no patronizing, pwease. :) </p>
<p>Let's say, hypothetically, that a current junior (male) has a quadruple legacy at a certain ivy. One of these alums has recently become an applicant interviewer for said ivy. The prospective student in question has great ambition, but his grades in his area of interest? Not so great. In fact, his GPA is pretty sub-par as a whole. SATs are good, but nothing to write home about. EC's... what EC's? There aren't many.</p>
<p>Prospect (and his family) thinks he's a sure bet for acceptance. Thoughts?</p>
<p>It would be a big benefit but I don’t think quad legacy is a guarantee. In the Harvard board, a double legacy with very solid stats was rejected. Your guy might be waitlisted or offered a gap year admission, but if his statistics are far below their standards, then I don’t think he’s a guarantee.</p>
<p>In our community, legacy didn’t seem to count for much. Near perfect SAT and 4.0 (unweighted) GPA’s were rejected from Harvard, Stanford and Penn this year with one or more legacies in each family. I think that unless the family is a very large donor, eg… name on a building, legacy doesn’t count for much anymore. What counts more is trying to put together a balanced class with good stats.</p>
<p>Legacy really counts at Princeton, where around 50% get in. At other schools, it will get you an extra reading by the adcoms (which, hey, is a pretty solid advantage) but certainly won’t get you in. Basically, for a solid applicant who may have otherwise been rejected for lack of something unique enough to get him accepted at hyper-competitive schools, it may tip him/her over the edge. But without the stats to get through the door, I wouldn’t hold my breath.</p>
<p>Maddenmd started to bring up a good point about legacy not counting for much anymore. Harvard (as an example since it was mentioned before) has just over 1500 freshman every year. So lets take the 6000 people currently in Harvard and look at them in 30 years when they have kids who are applying to colleges. Harvard can’t take every legacy they come by, even if every applicant was a double legacy, that leaves 3000 kids. That’s just from one snapshot. There are thousands and thousands of Ivy legacies out there, more every year, so the prestige of being the child of an Ivy graduate is continually declining. Legacy can’t mean much anymore because so many applicants have it. It may count for something if the acceptance comes down to you or one other student with an identical record, in other words it could be the tipping factor. That’s increasingly it though.</p>
<p>Not a shoo-in. You have to complete with other Quadruple Legacy’s. Also it largely depends on how established the legacy are. If your father, Harvard graduate, is a a high school teacher, Harvard may regret for admitting him. So you won’t have any chance to be admitted by Harvard. It made one mistake and won’t make another one. No offense to school teachers but it’s reality. Check out the book: the Price of Admission.</p>
<p>In one school about 10 kids admitted to Stanford are legacy though their grades are about 20-30%. These kids had no special talent except for money.</p>
<p>OKHPYSM I have never spoken to the personality of a poster but in this case I feel I must. What on Earth is wrong with you? What kind of derangement do you have to think teaching is such a lowly profession Harvard would REGRET admitting the student?! Teaching is one of the most important jobs there is, teachers shape the future of this country, they are the mechanism for every child and adolescent to become successful in life. Our society would DIE without teachers and that is not an exaggeration, we could not produce near enough intelligent thoughtful people to keep society moving without the guidance and instruction of teachers. As someone who hopes to become a teacher I find it extremely insulting for you to say the profession is anything less than vital. What job would be worthy of Harvard if not the very profession Harvard is made up of? What is Harvard but a collection of teachers? Are Harvard’s own staff not worthy of Harvard acceptance?</p>
<p>By the way, when you are going to criticize something you have absolutely no knowledge of you should at least use proper grammar so posters on this site can retain a twinge of respect for you. Unfortunately it’s far too late for that. Maybe you should have listened when one of your own many teachers tried to help you, although I doubt even the best could have helped an ignorant, obtuse, dim-witted student such as yourself.</p>
<p>Endowments are so large now and are managed by professionals so as to get about 20% return. Some are now in the tens of billions or dollars so it is unlikely that the paltry amount any one alum could contribute to a school would sway the adcomm. It would have to be a contribution in the tens of millions of dollars. It ain’t like it used to be.</p>