<p>As a fourth year about to graduate, I cannot stress how much it upsets me that UVA considers legacy in admissions (other public schools do, but of course I'm most upset about the school I go to considering legacy). Fifty years from now (when we're as socially democratic as Western Europe, hopefully) you will all look back on this as an embarrassment. The columnist is correct, it's an injustice. Future students, please fight this injustice. Admission deans who frequent College Confidential, please put a stop to this injustice.</p>
<p>Just like the gov’t (especially a gov’t as “socially democratic as Western Europe”), the University needs money, and a lot of that money comes from public endowment. Who gives that money? Alumni. Who gives money outside of said endowment? Tuition payers. When you give legacy status, you now have parents who will not only pay the rising OOS tuition, but they’ll come back for football games and basketball games and will still make their yearly donation to their beloved school. I knew quite a few folks who had multiple generations of Hoos, including one with both grandparents, and they weren’t “nobility” of any kind, they just loved the school and make their kid work their butt off to go, all of them being equally talented as their peers.
Is the practice right? Maybe not, but maybe it is fair to those who give back, just like IS taxpayers. Everything costs money though and UVa has to depend on its legacy folks’ donations to make things like new dorms and AccessUVA attainable, just like the gov’t has to depend on middle class workers’ taxes to pay for everyone’s roads and free health insurance.</p>
<p>UVA shares this embarassment with pretty much every other highly selective college (public or private) in the country.</p>
<p>Legacies get an admissions break. So do recruited athletes. So do minority applicants. So do in-state applicants (which is the biggest admissions preference at UVA). So do transfers from VA community colleges. There’s a rationale behind each of those breaks. </p>
<p>OP – did you, by chance, get the benefit of any of those admissions preferences? If so, do you think that your preference should also go away? Should we all be embarassed by the break that you got?</p>
<p>The parents of VA residents pay state taxes, so their kids get a break. Legacy parents pay much higher OOS tuition and often donate as alumni, so their kids get a break. Both sets of kids meet the same admission standards fyi. Both sets of kids get a break based on who their parents are.</p>
<p>As far as I know nobody dies from not getting to go to UVa. There are lots of good alternates–inside and outside Virginia.</p>
<p>As a non-UVA-grad parent of an OOS student (non-legacy), I don’t find the practice of taking legacy status into consideration problematic in the least, and fail to see how it could be considered an extreme “injustice” to OOS applicants more so than say the state law mandating that only 33% of students can be OOS. You know the rules and the risks going in.</p>
<p>The article’s author appears to be trying to make the case that taking legacy status into consideration is somehow equivalent to “legacy admission” or automatic acceptance of legacy students. In that case, yes, there may be a sense of implied noblity within the institution. But as legacy status is used today at UVA, this is not the case. The author also claims, in subsequent paragraphs that legacy student enrollment “still constitutes a small number…around 15%” and then immediately claims “Legacy students will always comprise a significant proportion of students at the University.” Which is it - small number or significant proportion? </p>
<p>Regardless, while the author amuses with grand implications of unconstitutionality, consideration of legacy status (different than legacy admission) is simply another characteristic helpful for admissions when trying to discern differences between 10 identically qualified applicants vying for the same single spot. It is little more than any other criteria for this group - including throwing them in the air and randomly selecting the one that lands on top. </p>
<p>I doubt you would find a court of law in the land that would interpret the Nobility Clause as a prohibition against consideration of legacy status in an application to a public university. In fact, Lawson’s opinion (upon which the author draws his conclusions) was written in 2008 with the purpose of soliciting a plaintiff to sue a University over legacy preferences to try to prove his premise. 5 years later, still no takers… Another lawyer trying to make a name with a made-up “landmark case.”</p>
<p>The author compared us to both european and private universities (if we were to eliminate legacy admissions). That’s not a realistic comparison as far as fundraising and community goes because those colleges clearly run on a different financial model. The author would need to find an example of a public university, especially in these economic times, that is successful without legacy boosts. I think it’s interesting that there isn’t any preference if a legacy is in state. I’m sure legacy parents complain about that all the time. I don’t have a problem with legacy admissions despite their questionable history (used to keep Jews out of the Ivy League – google it). I think the university needs to raise money any way it can and admissions to any top university are a dice roll anyways. When the writer has kids they’ll be glad for legacy admissions, just wait.</p>
<p>UVA gives a legacy boost to OOS applicants. IS legacies just get the IS boost.</p>
<p>UNC gives a serious legacy boost to OOS applicants. UNC also gives a very slight (i.e. tie-breaker) boost to IS legacies.</p>
<p>Michigan gives a legacy boost to OOS applicants.</p>
<p>Berkeley and UCLA don’t give any preference to legacies in admissions. But because of their hopeless financial situation, it is actually easier to get into Cal and UCLA OOS than IS. </p>
<p>The OOS acceptance rate UCLA is 30% vs. IS 21%. At Berkeley, 39% OOS vs. 24% IS. So at those schools, how much dough your parents can pay (the ultimate class-based preference) makes the difference.</p>
<p>I’ve said this before: the supposed “boost” for OOS legacies is brilliant marketing from UVa. It makes alums feel good without any data to support an actual advantage. Cumulative data show that OOS stats are higher than IS, INCLUSIVE of legacy, athletic recruits, URM and other hooked applicants. Is it the legacies dragging OOS averages down? My 35 ACT, 4.0 Echols kid is not. </p>
<p>When the legacy apps are “read” with IS, does that mean compared with Langley High School, Richmond’s Governor’s School, TJ? Parents from those schools will tell you how many stellar students do not get in. Does legacy trump geographic diversity? I suspect a non-legacy from North Dakota will get in before same legacy applicant from Maryland. And so it goes.</p>
<p>Harvard in on record that legacy status is a “feather on the scale.” I suspect UVa’s boost is similarly significant. Frankly, I would hope that a fourth year UVa student would have more critical thinking skills than the OP and CD article author have shown. At least ask for the data that prove the outrageous inequity.</p>
<p>I’d love to believe that the OP will feel the same way 25 years from now when as a loyal alum his children are applying for admission, but…</p>
<h2>I’d love to believe that the OP will feel the same way 25 years from now when as a loyal alum his children are applying for admission, but…</h2>
<p>Yeah you summed it up perfectly. I remember as a student going to the bookstore and lamenting the high price of sweatshirts and jackets. I would tell my friends, “why do they stock that stuff that only rich alumni can afford???”</p>
<p>Fast forward a few decades and now I AM that alum that drops $100 - $200 every time I’m there. Nabbed a great long sleeve golf shirt last week but I digress. :)</p>
<p>As a dad with a D who wants to attend UVA, I hope that her legacy status will be that proverbial “feather on the scale” that gets her in. If it doesn’t help, she’ll cry a little, suck it up, and move on with her life.</p>
<p>northwesty,
I can confirm what you heard about Cal. We were told very bluntly that statistically, our D has a better chance of getting into Cal than UVA because the UC schools are struggling financially and give a boost to OOS full pay applicants. </p>
<p>That’s a real injustice compared to a fourth year complaining about the very small benefit legacy status conveys at one school of thousands.</p>
<p>"I’ve said this before: the supposed “boost” for OOS legacies is brilliant marketing from UVa. It makes alums feel good without any data to support an actual advantage. Cumulative data show that OOS stats are higher than IS, INCLUSIVE of legacy, athletic recruits, URM and other hooked applicants. Is it the legacies dragging OOS averages down? My 35 ACT, 4.0 Echols kid is not. "</p>
<p>Mom2 – my experience is that the legacy boost at UVA is larger than the tie-breaker boost that legacies get at Ivy schools. But the fact is that many OOS legacy applicants (like your kid) do have stats that are higher than the IS averages. What the boost does is give legacy OOS-ers a significant edge in the competition against other non-legacy OOS applicants. </p>
<p>For your smart kid, the legacy boost meant that UVA was pretty much a safety school. Which is significant in the OOS applicant pool where the overall acceptance rate is 20-ish percent.</p>
<p>P.S. Agree that I’m not impressed at all by the logic/reasoning of the OP and the CD columnist…</p>
<p>Legacy isn’t all about donated money. Most alums contribute small amounts.</p>
<p>A lot of it has to do with the fact that legacy kids presumably have more awareness of the U than many others. Won’t explain this in full, but many kids take only a superficial look at even their dream schools. And it shows.</p>
<p>And UVA is s hard to predict, anyway. TJ, btw, gets a substantial number in.</p>
<p>The data shows the vast majority of students who have a UVa grad as a parent are NOT admitted. </p>
<p>Also, in the experiences among my own friends, only about 1/3 of legacies who applied to UVa in recent years were admitted. One of those who was denied was the son of a very large donor to the University. It is a preference, but not a huge preference.</p>
<p>Huge/big/feather on scale/tie-breaker is all pretty subjective and not very meaningful.</p>
<p>To really see how big the legacy boost is, you would have to see the average stats for the legacy admits as compared to the overall IS admit pool and OOS admit pool (which none of us have access to). But here’s the data we do have.</p>
<p>UVA says this about legacies (from a few years back so the data is dated): “We plan to maintain our current model, in which out-of-state legacy applicants are treated as if they are Virginians. The offer rate for Virginians to the University was 44 percent this year, the non-Virginian offer rate was 24 percent. There is a significant advantage to being a Virginian in our review.” </p>
<p><a href=“http://uvamagazine.org/university_digest/article/carrying_on_the_legacy/#.Un6L4uKjQdo[/url]”>http://uvamagazine.org/university_digest/article/carrying_on_the_legacy/#.Un6L4uKjQdo</a></p>
<p>So if that means OOS legacies get admitted at the same rate as IS-ers, the boost is 20 points in the admit rate. I’d say that’s huge. If it only boosts you up to 1 in 3 (as Charlie suggests), that’s still 9 points. Big bordering on huge imho.</p>
<p>The reason why the Ivy boost is so slight is that boosting legacies means the overall academic stats of the entire class goes down. That’s a problem at HYP and why they can only give tie-breaker boosts (i.e. the legacy doesn’t pull down the average). At a state school like UVA or UNC with two different admissions pools, if legacies are at the same level as the super-majority of students (i.e. IS) they are not diluting the overall stats of the entire class. They just dilute the stats increase that you might theoretically get from the OOS portion of the pool. My guess is that foregone increase is very small since there’s probably a much higher yield on OOS legacy admits as compared to the uber-qualified non-legacy OOS admits (who would also be getting admitted to some very high end schools).</p>
<p>In the prestige/stats competition, the numbers get run on who enrolls. Not who gets admitted but goes somewhere else. Legacy admits would tend to have a very favorable profile among applicants – higher yield, likely to be full payors of the higher OOS tuition, and stats that are average or higher than the whole class. It makes a lot of sense, even for legacy kids whose parents are not big time donors.</p>
<p>Looking at averages can be a little deceiving. The average applicant who is a son or daughter of a UVa grad may be slightly more qualified for other reasons than the average applicant. This is because having a well-educated parent on average results in higher academic qualifications for the student. (Most the people I knew at UVa are now MDs or very successful attorneys).</p>
<p>Charlie – totally agree. Lots of legacies would be very well qualified. They could have stats above the IS averages, perhaps, but while still not being in the top of the overall OOS applicant pool. As I said above, the legacies get a break as compared to other OOS-ers.</p>
<p>And, as you point out, since those legacy kids often have successful lawyers and docs as parents, the legacy kids as a demographic will tend to be fuller payors for the higher OOS tuition. Legacy is a great way for UVA to get higher yield, higher stats and higher revenue per student. That’s why they do it. </p>
<p>But moving you acceptance percentage from one in five to something more like one in three or two in five is statistically big.</p>
<p>Just some general thoughts since I haven’t checked in recently…</p>
<p>Remember that the legacy pool includes Virginia residents and OOSers. When people quote stats for legacy, they’re including all of them, regardless of residence. </p>
<p>Having done this for a while, I can say that there are many schools where constituents play a much, much bigger role in the process than they do at UVa. </p>
<p>Ability to pay is not a factor in our review and we don’t make any assumption about someone’s financial position based on where they went to college. UVa alumni are everywhere, in all sorts of professions.</p>
<p>If N. Aljassar is so interested in the plight of in-state Virginia students, perhaps the place to start is eliminating the seats given to foreign students? The article fails in logic. </p>
<p>His time would have likely been better be served examining the lack of educational opportunity of women in the Sharia-Muslim world.</p>
<p>When talking legacy, too often the impact is magnified. UVA is trying to serve a population that has unusual extremes- from TJ and the rest of northern VA to the western hills and corners. Plenty of great IS candidates see their chances shaped by this.</p>
<p>“Ability to pay is not a factor in our review and we don’t make any assumption about someone’s financial position based on where they went to college. UVa alumni are everywhere, in all sorts of professions.”</p>
<p>Sure. Ability to pay doesn’t play a role in the admissions decision by UVA. Cost, though, plays a huge role in the student/family decision on where to enroll. That’s a primary reason why the IS yield rate is triple the OOS yield rate.</p>
<p>The OOS legacy pool is certainly going to be a good place for UVA to fish for candidates who are very well qualified as compared to the overall applicant pool and who are more likely than average to (i) enroll and (ii) be able to pay full freight OOS tuition.</p>