How much of a leg up in admissions does being the student of faculty at a top school like Harvard or Stanford?
Definite hook for a qualified applicant.
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If the student is qualified academically- a huge leg up. Not qualified? Doesn’t matter.
Even at other schools, children of faculty have a leg up on others My DS mentioned to me the other day that he was surprised how many of his classmates are children of faculty. I think this is for 3 reasons:
- Genetics
- Growing up in a household that values education
- Access to opportunities (e.g. working in a parents lab)
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You’ve left off the fourth and most important reason- the tuition break/credit/employee benefit. I grew up in a college town and although there have been MANY changes to the benefit to make it less valuable, it is still significant. I had HS friends whose parents told them that other than West Point or Julliard, they were attending the local college period end of story. If you had a parent who was an employee (not just faculty- librarian, custodian, food service worker, housing office…) the local private U was cheaper than community college, not to mention our flagship state U or any other private college.
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Do you mean “Child of Faculty”?
That doesn’t make sense, since you have written:
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@MWolf I appreciate the concern.
I happen to live in a college town with a prestigious university and asked out of curiosity - I noted that a noticeably high percentage of children of faculty were getting into the respective school. Sorry about the lack of detail here mentioning that I am in fact not a child of faculty. Thanks!
At Stanford, it’s just about an automatic admission as long as you can “walk and chew gum at the same time.” As an example, one neighbor, who’s a member of the Stanford faculty, all 3 children were “magically” admitted. 
Kids were no more or less brighter than what folks like to call the “average excellent kid.” Yes, I’m bitter about it. 
Was the faculty member also an alumnus, and was Stanford really interesting in keeping them (the faculty member)? Universities can put a lot of money in retaining some faculty, and automatic admission of kids is pretty cheap.
On the other hand, if genetics counts for something, remember just how exceptional these kid’s parents are, academically.
In order to be considered seriously for a job at Stanford, the applicant would have to have done their PhDs at universities whose PhD programs accepted around 10% of their applicants. In order to be accepted to those particular graduates programs, these applicants would have had to have their undergraduates degree from a colleges with an acceptance rate of 5%-20%.
For each academic position, there are, on average, 100 applicants. So the offer rate per position is around 1%. At least 1/4 of the applicants are graduates of top graduate programs, so 0.04% hiring rate from graduates of top programs, and these are accepted from top undergraduate programs at about a 25%-30% rate. So a 1.2% hiring rate of students who were already stood out as applicants for “elite” undergraduate programs.
Even if their kids aren’t nearly as good, academically, they still should be good enough to stand out among applicants to Stanford.
BTW, we have good friends, and he is faculty at a large public university (not a flagship), moderately ranked (top 100). Both his daughters were accepted at multiple Ivies (one attended Yale, the other attended Brown). I do not know whether their neighbors knew how good these kids were. However, unless the neighbors were good friends, they would not have known much more than that these two girls were reasonably bright.
So, two things - there are advantages to having a parent who is an academic, no matter where, and, you never know what these kids may have accomplished.
Of course, it is easy for me to me philosophical, and say “these kids were likely good enough, blah, blah, blah”, since our kid’s colleges admissions journey was filled with far fewer disappointments than most, and have not had to deal with observing kids who are less accomplished than our kid being accepted to colleges that rejected our kid.
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