It’s not just the CDS, Harvard itself has said it has a legacy preference.
From an article on NPR:
"A 2013 analysis conducted by Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research found that legacy status conferred a 40-percentage point advantage of being accepted, but mainly for students already in the most desirable applicant pool.
“Their applications tend to be well put-together,” Bacow (Harvard new pres) said. They have deep knowledge of the institution. So it’s a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool."
“Critics of the practice agree with Bacow — and say that, therefore, any policy of legacy preference amounts to a double advantage for already-privileged students.”
Deep knowledge of the institution and a double advantage? I wonder how they got those.
Rakesh Khurana, dean of the college, said a legacy preference can foster another kind of diversity: placing people with deep Harvard experience alongside those without it."
"Another kind of diversity? that’s a big lol there.
I know I’m in the minority (so I expect some support here ) but I don’t have a problem with legacy considerations. Some schools consider legacy many others don’t. Same with athletics. Choice is a good thing.
“Preference” is a word that misleads many. Someone countered me, in another thread, that even H uses the word. But it’s just a word. It does not mean they “prefer” to admit particular groups. It does not mean they sidestep their own processes to shoot legacies ahead. It’s a consideration. And if your app/supps/LoRs don’t rock what the elite is looking for, in full, sorry.
Nor does a “40 point advantage,” based on final class composition, mean a legacy gets a specific boost. Sure, some legacies may have lower stats. But decisions are not made just on hs and test stats.
The sorry news, and a reason behind my nagging to know your targets well (not just what you want and a stats comparison/list of clubs and titles- or getting on the mailing list, lol,) is that, ime, most kids do not take this further look. Do not. They confuse colleges or go generic, emphasize non relevant details. etc. The vast bulk, ime.
Unearned privilege? How, when any kid could take this deeper look? Any SES kid.
I don’t know why, especially among our data-savvy posters, they don’t stop to realize the H mysteries “solved” by the trial are nothing of the sort. You’re looking at after-the-fact numbers and trying to glean the process out of that. Not “research sound.” Not a more complete view. Assumptions. What does it really tell you about app packages, the process of reviewing, what adcoms really want and like?
Something blossom said does not jibe with my experience:
Someday, when I have a free day, I am going to go through my gigantic reunion book and systematically compile data about where people’s kids went to college. It’s self-reported, and not complete, but an awful lot of people did the self-reporting, so it’s a pretty interesting data set. (We are old enough now so that almost all the children of class members have at least started college.)
Anyway, two things I took from my unsystematic perusal of the book: (1) More kids than I expected had gone to Yale (my college). (2) The most common element among legacy kids was having their legacy parent be a teacher, including both university and high school teachers. Not universal, by any stretch of the imagination, but really noticeable. My close friend who is a high school teacher married to another high school teacher had both kids go to Yale. (One was accepted SCEA and didn’t apply elsewhere, the other was accepted everywhere she applied, including Harvard.) My other friends who had more than one kid accepted at Yale were all full-time faculty somewhere, except for a Skull and Bones member (that works, too). I have other college friends who would be legitimate development targets none of whose children were accepted at Yale. (One is currently a trustee of the very prestigious university her three children attended, and from which she got her law degree.) The reunion book showed me that pattern was far from unusual.
It also jibes with what I see elsewhere. My last two cousins to be accepted at Harvard – one accepted also at Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT, the other taken late off the waitlist when he was planning to go to Vanderbilt – were both legacy children of teachers, one in a university setting and the other in an elementary school.
After controlling for admission reader ratings, race, SES, athletic status, and other factors; Harvard’s Office of Internal Research found that Harvard legacies have a 11x odds ratio advantage An unhooked applicant subgroup with an average 5% chance of admission would expected to have an average 5% * 11 = 55% chance of admission, if all scores, stats, … were the same and the only change in application was not-legacy → legacy. This legacy advantage was slightly larger than the degree of admissions advantage associated with being African American, and a far greater admissions advantage than associated with being lower SES. Among high stat 1-2 academic rating applicants (1-2 academic rating has strong correlation with having high stats), the actual admit rate difference between legacies and non-legacies was ~40 percentage points, which is where the NPR quote comes from.
Yes, Harvard’s internal analysis is far from perfect and does not consider all factors used by admissions readers in decisions. It also does not consider things like early applicants and dean/director’s special interest list, which are expected to favor legacies. Nevertheless, other more complex analyses that do consider these factors and can explain the majority of variance in admissions decisions still find an extremely large degree of boost for being legacy. Every review of any kind I am aware of found a strong degree of admission advantage for legacies at Harvard. Harvard has made similar public claims about a substantial legacy advantage as a defense about their racial distribution (Asian students are less likely to be legacies/athletes than White students, so lower admit rate for comparably qualified Asians relates to their strong legacy/athletic preferences rather than racial preference). To deny existence of a legacy preference at Harvard suggests ignorance or being disingenuous . Some example Harvard reader comments from applicant admission files are below. All of these students were ultimately admitted to Harvard.
*“Without lineage there would be little case.”
“Not a great profile but just strong enough #s and grades to get the tip from lineage.”
“We’ll need confirmation that dad is legit S&S because this is a luxury case otherwise.”*
This thread is about the poor SES distribution at “elite” colleges. As previously noted ~half Harvard legacies within the class self reported as top 1% income. Almost none reported as bottom 60%. This makes legacies one of the more influential factors in Harvard’s poor SES distribution. It’s not as influential as self selection effects, but it’s certainly relevant for a discussion of SES distribution at Harvard and other “elites” and whether they have “elitist” admission policies due to legacy preference.
Whether this legacy preference is good/bad or necessary/unnecessary is a different matter. My personal opinion is that legacies as a whole usually have numerous advantages throughout their life. There is no need to give further advantages in college admission and further worsen diversity, including SES diversity. Removing legacy preference will likely impact both percent of applicants who are full pay and legacy donations. This could have implications on financial health of the college including ability to offer generous financial aid to lower SES applicants. However, if the goal is improving financial health of the college, I’d prefer approaches that target that goal more directly, rather than doing indirect things with legacy preferences.
Data, thank you for the thoughtful (and sobering) post and thanks for doing the legwork on the stats. Agree 100% that the “legacy advantage” of having college educated parents, regardless of income, is so substantial that the finger on the scale is gratuitous.
According to the Harvard data for the Class of 2022 (the class of 2023 didn’t want to say how much money their parents had), at least 50% of the primary legacies were from the top 1% by income (46.4% earned more than $500K, and anything above $421K is top 1%).
Since, in 2018, 14% of Harvard students were primary legacies, and half of them were in the top 1%, therefore, 7% of the students of top 1% were legacies. If the percent of the top 1% at Harvard didn’t change since the NYT article (15%) that would mean that about 47% of the wealthiest kids at Harvard were accepted as legacies.
It really does look like Harvard is trying to bolster the number of rich kids by providing legacy preferences. Since the percent of kids from families which are top 1% by income is far higher than they are among alumni, I would go so far as to hazard that the top 1% may be the main beneficiaries of legacy preference.
On the other hand, if accepting those 100 rich legacies who are full pay, and likely serious donors, help Harvard accept an equal number of poor students for $0 EFC, it’s a good deal, IMHO.
@MWolf – Did the students report their parents’ income? These families would not have applied for financial aid, and I am skeptical that the students knew their parents’ earnings.
It seems to me that there is no point in saying that the Harvard legacies had to be qualified in order to be admitted. That should go without saying. Harvard has a great surplus of qualified applicants, according to their rhetoric.
It seems to me that the meaning of “preference” is this: Given two equally qualified applicants–call them A and 1–if 1 is a legacy and A is not, then the overwhelmingly probable admissions outcomes are: Both A and 1 are admitted; 1 is admitted, but A is not; neither A nor 1 is admitted. With applicants who are essentially equally qualified, I doubt that there are many instances where A is admitted and 1 is not. (I exclude cases where A is a member of an under-represented group, or an athlete, because both can be hooks in themselves.) The Harvard data further suggest that there is a likely outcome that 1 is admitted, but A is not, even when A is a smidgeon better qualified than 1.
On the one hand, this only affects students who are very near to the borderline for admission. Most applicants don’t make it up into that range. A few are obvious admits, legacy or not. But for the applicants on the borderline, legacy status actually gives a very considerable boost.
Interesting, QM. I don’t think anyone can actually prove borderline legacy kids get any significant boost when the admit rate is 5% or so. And we know H rejects about 2/3 of legacies. Don’t know that all of those denied are radically underqualified. (Certainly not when this thread rests on and repeats that legacies are uber “advantaged.” Rich. Getting all that test support. Etc.) More likely, these rejected are overall unremarkable, a form of “same old/same old.” Good kids, but not enough to reject the “A” kids, as you noted those.
It’s rare one can directly compare two candidates and find them equally qualified. Each has his/her own fingerprint, so to say. Eg, not identical activities or self presentation or the traits.
So does the legacy get magic extra points to “make” him surpass the better kid? I don’t think the answer is as clear as others do. Nor the process as simple or easy as some feel, expecially when trying to make the trial-related info fit the argument here.
So, if you get two (or 220 or 2200) kids who do impress, who are worth going to bat for, I think some feel adcoms throw in the towel, just rubber stamp the legacy. But there are many needs to fill, many factors to consider.
Looking- your presumption is that the non-legacy kid who gets rejected is a ho-hum high stats, boring, nothing to see reject. Which for hundreds of the non-legacy’s is true.
But I think the rest of us are considering the “non-legacy reject from Harvard” kid who DOES get accepted to Princeton or MIT or some other place that is ALSO looking for secret sauce. MIT is candid that legacy isn’t a consideration-- and I’ll take them at their word unless you know otherwise. And for sure, they are looking for something different than Harvard.
But for the “pretty darn special” kids who are not legacies, who get rejected by Harvard but accepted at peer type schools- then wow, the legacy kid who got that place must be pretty darn special in comparison. And we all know situations where that is MOST EMPHATICALLY not the case. Certainly from my kids HS. The double legacy accepted at Harvard- who would most likely have ended up at a non-peer school were it not for legacy. Not a dope, but the “tennis playing kid with good grades” who hardly had the special aura that the other Harvard admits had. My kids HS typically had 3-4 Harvard admits a year, and the three were usually off the charts amazing. Just exceptional, and usually fantastic human beings as well.
And the 4th? A BWRK with legacy, both development cases and not. Makes you cynical. I don’t fault Harvard for admitting the kid whose parents endow a chair in neuroscience out of gratitude- that seems to me to be a fair trade, especially when the kid can keep up academically and is likely to add something nice to campus. We’re not talking 500 SAT’s here. But it’s the obfuscating of “we don’t really admit as many legacies as you think we do” that is just a little ingenuous. And your insistence that all of those legacies are so darn special with secret accomplishments that come out in their highly tailored essays that show their unique Harvard DNA. Na.
I’ve interviewed too many legacy kids for Brown whose “unique” understanding of the campus and why it’s their first choice came down to “Brown is very artsy and I’m very artsy”. Yawn.
Thanks, blossom. Your point about the non-legacies who are accepted to other high-profile schools is quite interesting, as are your comments about the admitted BWRK kids who are legacies , but not stand-outs.
I have also seen both legacy and non-legacy admits locally. I have to admit that around here it is somewhat difficult to tell them apart. There are truly outstanding applicants in both admitted sets. There are also some I would consider fine, but nothing special, again in both admitted sets. Perhaps they were all “savvy” in a way that is undetectable to me. It is sort of weird, but I can’t think off hand of anyone locally who applied to Harvard and was not admitted–maybe I know one who probably applied to Harvard, but I suppose generally they are just not talking about it. This situation is probably different on the East Coast.
It is possible that as the Harvard anti-discrimination case moves through the courts, more information will be brought out, related to the actual strength of the legacy preference. Though maybe not.
Wasn’t it already revealed that (based on Harvard admissions readers’ ratings) the legacy applicant cohort was stronger (no surprise given the SES advantages as well as advantages of having parents with closer connection to the college) but that the legacy admit cohort was weaker?
Some of the logical contortions from one poster in this thread are absurd. We’re supposed to believe the reason Harvard doesn’t admit more low income students is because none apply, despite the sub-4% acceptance rate for non-legacy, non-athlete applicants. We’re supposed to believe that Harvard with an endowment to rival some sovereign wealth funds is incapable of getting more poor kids to apply. We’re supposed to believe a 33% legacy vs 4.5% overall acceptance rate is a trivial difference.
I agree with this. There is no need to share this detailed financial information in this case. The only thing that my kids know is that their education is fully funded.
They have no idea how much we make. Any guesses they make could be off by a factor of 3.
“But I think the rest of us are considering the “non-legacy reject from Harvard” kid who DOES get accepted to Princeton or MIT or some other place that is ALSO looking for secret sauce.”
True, if a kid got into Princeton and Yale but not Harvard it would be because of an institutional need of Harvard, but that could be legacy, development, athlete, urm, low ses. I know some kids like that but it’s too anecdotal to make any conclusions. I would lean to athletes with legacy and wealth as well.
“MIT is candid that legacy isn’t a consideration-- and I’ll take them at their word unless you know otherwise”
I agree as well since MIT was not built on legacies as Harvard is. They’re pretty much built on getting the top stem students in the country and legacy is a residual effect. Harvard, on the hand, has been built on legacies, which they’ve used in their past to exclude women, people of color, Jews, et. al. They cannot all of sudden stop considering legacies even if most of us wanted them to. They love wealth, sports like lacrosse, rowing, and many of those will be legacies. There will also be a bias toward legacies that, again, is just built-in (research on biases say we have about 35-40 ones we use for decisions and many of them are subconscious, so we don’t even know about them).
MIT is very upfront about this. When the child of an alum applies, the alum soon receives a letter saying something to the effect of “We are delighted your child has applied to MIT. … Legacy has no influence on your child’s application.”
MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford, CalTech and Cambridge function perfectly well without legacy. Sharply reducing legacy preferences would decrease the elitist nature of the Ivy colleges without decreasing their quality.
Without seeing tax returns, kids can still know what range their parent’s income is in. The survey treats all households with $500k+ income as one group. If one parent is a neurosurgeon or an equity partner in Big Law, and old enough to have college age kids, it’s a safe bet they make at least $500k.
) but I don’t have a problem with legacy considerations. Some schools consider legacy many others don’t. Same with athletics. Choice is a good thing.