<p>My Dad earned his PhD (rather ScD, same concept though) from Harvard. Would this typify me as a legacy of Harvard University for an undergraduate application.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>According to the Admissions website’s FAQs “Among a group of similarly distinguished applicants, the daughters and sons of College alumni/ae may receive an additional look.”</p>
<p>Since a PhD is not a graduate of the College, you would not be considered a legacy.</p>
<p>Seconded. Sorry champ, you’re not a legacy.</p>
<p>Nope, but really legacies don’t have it much easier.</p>
<p>At the Ivies, and some elite LACs, Legacies certainly do have it easier. At HYP the admit rate for a legacy student is more around 40%. At Harvard they get a sticker on top of their folder that says “legacy”.</p>
<p>It’s fine. I guess I’ve been thinking for all my life (at least since I started thinking about college) that I would be a so-so legacy at Harvard. I always called it unfair, but knew the advantages. Time to put my money where my mouth is, I suppose.</p>
<p>The effect of legacy is about a lot more than just the fact that your parents graduated from the school. The acceptance rate for legacies is mostly so high because the children of parents who went to schools like Harvard/Yale/Princeton/etc are much more likely to have been raised in environments that are conducive to their also attending those schools.</p>
<p>Although it’s true that legacy (and some other things) can greatly increase your chances for acceptance, nothing is going to save you from being a “so-so” student as you self-describe.</p>
<p>I really don’t understand why posters here diminish the power of legacy status in Harvard admissions. Almost every legacy I have met has some quality or relative academic deficiency, which are mostly not present in the rest of the student body. The argument that it’s a magical combination of simply being a better applicant and receiving a little boost is practically unsupported.</p>
<p>How’s this for support?: The admission rate at Harvard for Yale legacies or Princeton legacies (who of course get no special consideration) is only a point or two below the admission rate for Harvard legacies. That information is a number of years old at this point, and was never published, but it came out of Harvard admissions office internal research.</p>
<p>And: At Yale, at least (and Harvard is not likely different), legacy students have higher standardized test scores and higher college GPAs than non-legacy students. Now, that may be a little fudged, since it doesn’t back out athletic or other non-academic recruits, who are probably disproportionately non-legacy.</p>
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<p>Silly thing to say. You’ve been at school for a semester and you think that you can pass judgment on every student at Harvard whose parents are alumni? Confirmation bias at its best.</p>
<p>An admissions officer at Harvard informed my group that the admin rate for legacies is about 10%. Only marginally better than the 7% admission rate for non-legacies. Not to mention that legacies tend to be more self selective.</p>
<p>Getting a 3% boost from a general chance of 7% is, to paraphrase Joe Biden, a BFD. Your shot as an individual increases ~50% with legacy status.</p>
<p>I dunno, but when I visited harvard, the admissions officer there gave me that figure (I asked).</p>