Does anyone know the Stanford legacy Admit Rate?
It runs at about three times the rate for non-legacy applicants. But, before you go jumping to a conclusion, you had best consider what other competitive characteristics alumni children might have which gives them an advantage over the applicant pool as a whole.
Thanks for the reply, JustOneDad. BTW, do you also know the Stanford Hispanic Admit Rate? Do you have any idea what a Hispanic Legacy’s chances might be? What about a Hispanic Legacy who applies EA? Sorry if I’m being a bit bothersome.
I think if you look up the Common Data Set, it would answer a lot of your questions.
Anecdotally, it seems like Stanford takes a very significant amount of Hispanic students and a significant amount of legacies (relatively speaking), so a qualified Hispanic legacy would have a very good shot.
I doubt there’ll be combined statistics on Hispanic and legacy students, though
15% of last year’s admitted freshmen were Mexican-American or Hispanic.
Thanks for your advice, Stanaccepted. I’ll look at Stanford’s Common Data Set.
The legacy advantage is significant - a recent alumni magazine article cited the 3x number above - but still a large majority of legacies don’t get in at Stanford.
Stanford has a broad definition of legacy - it includes graduate school alumni children - which tends to weaken the legacy preference as more applicants qualify. Some schools, such as Harvard, only count undergraduate alumni children as legacies and - not coincidentally I think - admit a higher percentage of legacies.
@DomInIcBayer. You have to understand there are so many high achieving Stanford grads (professional-wise as well as wealth-wise) who happen to have Hispanic Stanford legacy children that you will be competing with many other potential high achieving Hispanic Stanford legacies…don’t make the mistake of assuming it may be “easier” compared to high achieving first generation low socioeconomic Hispanic students like this student from Georgia who is planning to attend Stanford: http://www.barrowcountynews.com/section/11/article/23771/
…there are hooks and there are HOOKS. Every applicant will be evaluated by the sum of its parts…legacy status being just one of them…
Thanks for the advice, @gravitas2. I will take this into account.
I can speak for my DS High School, a Public very competitive School with a Class of more than 1000, don’t know how many applied to Stanford but only 3 were admitted, all three were Hispanic, with high GPAs (top 2%), EC’s National Medals, and SAT 2100+, one was EA, other was deferred and then accepted and the last was RD. They also were accepted in other top universities, as Harvard, Brown, Yale and Caltech. Only one of them has family legacy. As Gravitas mentioned they were all three high achievers children.
If the overall admit rate is say 5% or so, 3X for legacy only takes you up to 15%; the vast majority of legacy applicants are still rejected.
Yes 3 x ~ 5% is still not a big number . . . definitely a challenge for alumni relations.
I wonder if it was still 3x back in the old days . . . say 20 years ago when Stanford admitted about 20% overall. 3 x 20% would be a much different proposition.