Legacy has nothing to do with this situation…
What would the person write about your daughter? Would you ghostwrite the letter for him? Just, no.
It’s money that talks, not alumni status. These colleges have tons of “well-known” alums and they don’t even let all those legacy kids in; what makes you think that this “well-known alumni” is so darn important that the word from him would make a differences?
Unless there is money dripping from his pockets. In which case it matters not one bit if he is alum, because the color of the money is no greener from an alum’s pocket.
Let’s apply some common sense. This alum is sooooo influential he can get people in with a letter and he’s offering his services to friends of friends he doesn’t even know? Does that make ANY sense? If he had that power, he’d already be overrun by people whom he DOES know. Not you, who is a mere friend of a friend.
I’d hold off. If he’s wait listed then i’d try the letter. At that point may do some good if alum can vouch he’d attend if accepted.
It seems to me that the person who offered to contact his friend, who is an alumni, was just trying to brag about his connections.
Maybe I’m wrong……
Why would an adcom care that an alum is “vouching” that he’d attend? Honestly, people need to get real. Unless it’s the president of the United States calling, this is all people just exaggerating their own self-importance.
"Let’s see - do we want to pull Stan Stident off the wait list? Gosh, stop the presses - Joe Schmoe class of 1995 will vouch for him. That settles it.
Get real.
OP: similar questions arise about rec letters from govt officials. Again, unless the student has directly worked below that person, the enthusiastic letter from a rookie teacher just out of student teaching will be better for the applicant than the “celebrity”.
Your situation where the Brown alum who was a big donor was willing to go deep into the game for you – isn’t in play here. I think menloparkmom hits it. Your “friend” is suggesting he/she can introduce your kiddo to a big shot Williams alumnus. Already that’s 3 levels of separation. Whatever is written, will simply water down your kid’s other rec letters. Remember, the rec letter should be about the kid, not the writer – cf. my earlier analogy about the enthusiastic rookie teacher.
Heck, that’s how I got my first part-time paying job in high school. A friend of the family who really didn’t know me “recommended” me to the people who hired as a favor to my parents. I had been scouring the area for months applying to every minimum wage position a high school kid could do, to no avail. When the friend of the family stepped in, that changed. Within days, I was interviewed and hired.
I worked hard for them, but getting that interview was NOT based on “merit.”
Much of the world works that way. College admissions, for the most part, give a different impression because many of them DO seem to be based on merit, and we complain a lot about those that aren’t.
But you probably didn’t have 10+ other kids applying for the same job, all top hs performers. Your friend pulled a connection.
“These many years later, with a better understanding of hooks and legacies, it doesn’t feel quite so wrong to me.” Kids have enough trouble getting the right recs from the right teachers. Some vague letter from a stranger won’t tip anything. It clutters. And your kid’s judgment could be questioned. The good character/nice kid thing should come through in his or her own application.
Legacy is different. It’s a relationship to the college. And you still need to be qualified and competitive.
OP, is your daughter interested in Williams? If so, she could go meet with this alumnus and talk about Williams–sort of an informal alumni interview. There’s nothing wrong with that. She might learn something. If he writes a letter, it will probably do neither good nor harm. As others mentioned, he probably can’t really help unless he has power, and is willing to wield it on your behalf–not too likely.
Let me put it this way: I’m a Yale alumnus, and I have absolutely no clout in terms of helping anybody get in. But if a friend wanted me to talk to a kid about Yale, I’d be delighted to do that, and I might even have some tips about applying. I don’t think it would be a complete waste of time for the kid, although they wouldn’t get a boost with the admissions office.
In a similar vein, then, I would imagine a current student who is achieving great things at a college would have no clout at all in getting an applicant in (say, a friend of the family). I’m having this discussion with someone right now.
@lauriejgs, I very much doubt if it would make any difference. But if the current student is offering to do something, then perhaps he or she could start by calling up the Admissions Office and asking if a recommendation letter from him or her would be read. I certainly don’t think it makes sense to ask a student to do this.
It’s likely to be counterproductive.
However, if you want your daughter to have a boost
1° she should request an alumnus interview ASAP or, better, request an interview when she visits campus
2° fill out the “request info” form ASAP
3° read everything she can about he college and take notes; take notes in her “college notebook” when she visits = use that when she write her “Why Williams” essay.
4° ask her current teachers NOW whether they’ll be able to write her a recommendation for Williams. (If Williams isn’t known in your area, have her say “for a top university” instead).
5° She CAN ask for a supplemental recommendation, but it has to be from someone who knows her well AND for whom she did something out of school. It could be the parents of the kids she’s babysat over every break for the past 4 years or the baker for whom she works over the summer or the rabbi and the priest and the imam for whom she developed an interfaith youth council in your town.
I seriously doubt that a current student at any college would be a worthwhile reference.
Notable exception might be a place like Davidson that asks for a peer reference.
At my institution (from what I’ve heard – don’t actually work for admissions) the kind of letter described above gets you a courtesy read if the application might not make the first cut. So it’s a help to the kid with a great story and essays, but stats in the bottom half who might be overlooked. The OP’s daughter is already in the holistic read pile, so I would say no benefit.
One thing I have seen with donors is more general influence for a high school. My son’s high school (school itself is old, but the high school was added in the last 20 years and is relatively small, so we do have some name recognition issues) has two extremely wealthy and influential donors/parents/grandparents who are substantial (8 figure at least) donors to their alma maters (one HYP, one top 20).
In both cases, they fund one substantial 4-year scholarship (chosen through our school if more than one kid is admitted) a year (full tuition for the top 20, not sure about the HYP scholarship). I have no doubt that their knowledge that a large 4-year scholarship will disappear if no kid from our school is taken has some influence on the margins (FWIW – we have had very few acceptances to the other two HYP schools, but the one with the donor-funded scholarship seems to take someone almost every year). Neither donor writes recs for kids they don’t know, but they do try to promote the quality and rigor of the school and I’m sure that has helped some.
Yep, out of the 30,000 hs in the US, yours is super important. Not picking on you specifically, but people really overestimate how little these colleges care about individual high schools. And why should they? If all they do is continue to re-pick kids from the same hs over and over again, then how are they supposed to make room for the bright kid from rural Wyoming or the bright kid from a failing inner city school? It’s very “let them eat cake” when people think their (typically affluent suburban) hs are “owed” or “due” X number of acceptances because it’s been that way in the past.
Come on, Pizzagirl, even Harvard is going to pay attention if there is a high school that offers a substantial scholarship to a kid who is accepted to Harvard.
Certainly not super important at all in my case (I think my child’s school is excellent, but in no way important to any of these schools. There certainly seem to be “feeder schools” both from the NE and some other boarding schools and some urban prestigious publics and magnets (e.g., Thomas Jefferson in VA) – I’d actually say that colleges do pay attention to those schools. I’m just talking about the difference between “never heard of them” and “oh yeah them, their kids don’t stink” In the same way that it’s helpful to have college AOs visit your campus so that they can actually see your curriculum and get an idea of quality of instruction and rigor – we also do better with the schools that come to our campus every year – not surprising. AOs spend a huge chunk of their year visiting high schools – not just to recruit kids, but to get a feel for their schools – do they grade inflate, will the kids be well-prepared? AOs have regions because they actually try to get to know the school systems. HYP and all the other selectives are very familiar with major public school systems, how rigorous they are, whether their kids are successful on their campus.
At best, it’s a very very marginal benefit and of course the numbers I’ve seen are too small to be statistically significant. Maybe it’s not the money, but someone with a little clout getting the AOs to actually look at our program. No one expects a kid below the median to get any kind of bonus points because some donor will cough up $200,000; we’re talking about kids well-within the stats (some above the 75%) with solid applications. It’s just interesting to see that over the last 8 years one HYP has admitted 1 kid from your school, while another took 8 – might be a coincidence, might be that our kids fit better with the latter school. Parents love to speculate.
I’ll believe it when AOs visit more than the usual affluent suburban or public magnet schools. Til then, it feels like the same old - go to New Canaan and Short Hills and Lower Merion and (insert affluent suburban district for every mid to large city in the country). I don’t blame AOs - they are going to get more bang for the buck in Edina or Wayzata, MN (affluent Minneapilus suburbs) than say, Hibbing or Bemidji. But then let’s not “punish” the kids in Hibbing or Bemidji because their hs isn’t “known.”
At my kids HS Yale always took 4 kids; Harvard 4, Princeton either zero or 1. Then one year Yale took nobody. Oh my gosh, the teeth grinding. The next year much angst among the kids because 5 super duper “absolutely belong at Harvard” kids were applying to Harvard. Harvard took all 5 (I’m sure there were other applicants- but these were the “known” Harvard kids). Yale still took zero. Fast forward a few years later- Harvard now taking 2-3. Yale taking 2-3. Princeton taking zero or 1 or 2 or 3.
Moral of the story- it’s not a quota system. They aren’t toting up the numbers from the HS’s in your region and equalizing them to make sure that they’re being consistent with last year. They aren’t calling their buddy at Princeton to say, “Hey we’re taking Joanie so you get Howie. They both play the cello so we only need one of them”.
If your kids are at a “feeder school” it doesn’t mean that your HS “feeds”. It means that the adcom’s at a couple of colleges know the curriculum well enough to evaluate an A in APUSH vs. an A in history at a random HS with huge grade inflation where the instructor is one chapter ahead of the kids. And that “rigor” means something. Or not.
But adcom’s don’t sit around wondering, “Hey, are we getting any strong math and science kids from New Trier this year? Sure hope so!”.