<p>"A researcher at Harvard University recently examined the impact of legacy status at 30 highly selective colleges and concluded that, all other things being equal, legacy applicants got a 23.3-percentage-point increase in their probability of admission. If the applicants' connection was a parent who attended the college as an undergraduate, a "primary legacy," the increase was 45.1-percentage points."</p>
<p>Smart parents have smart kids with good grades and good SAT scores who have a higher chance of getting in anyways which I think accounts for a part of the legacy “boost”, and this is coming from a junior who is a legacy at Penn and Georgetown.</p>
<p>No, you’re completely misreading what this study concludes: all other things equal (i.e., as compared to non-legacies with identical grades and identical test scores and presumably identically smart parents, though I imagine they can’t actually measure that last factor), legacies have an enormous advantage. I don’t know why it’s so hard to believe this. The colleges themselves tell us they use legacy as a “tip” factor. That is, they won’t use legacy status to to make up for deficiencies in the applicant’s stats and credentials, but when comparing the legacy applicant to an otherwise identically credentialed applicant, they’ll use legacy status to tip the scales in favor of admitting the legacy over the otherwise-equal non-legacy. That’s just an enormous, systematic advantage for legacies, and it shows up in the Harvard empirical data. </p>
<p>Legacies may be, as a group, smarter and better-credentialed than the average applicant, but this study isn’t about that; it finds that legacies have an enormous admissions advantage over those people in the applicant pool who are equally smart and equally well-credentialed but are non-legacies.</p>
<p>EDIT: Actually, it’s more compelling than that. The author of the study cleverly got this result by looking at applicants to multiple schools who were legacies at one of the schools to which they applied. So it’s comparing individual students to themselves! That does control for everything–grades, test scores, parents, everything. So, for example, an applicant to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT who was a legacy at Yale was far more likely to get into Yale than any of those other schools; the Harvard legacy far more likely to get into Harvard, etc. Aggregate all that across all the cross-applicants to all the schools studied, and legacy turned out to be a huge advantage.</p>
<p>If the other schools knew you were a legacy at another top school (which they might) and unlikley to attend H over Y they might just not admit you for spite. Nothing is ever all other things being equal.</p>
<p>Well, how would they know? My recollection is that schools ask about your legacy status with them in their own supplement. They don’t ask where else you’re a legacy, and there would be no obvious way to find out. It might happen occasionally, say if you had a famous parent who famously went to a particular school; but that’s going to be a tiny fraction of cases.</p>