<p>This year there are so many stories of fine applicants being turned away, I don’t know how you could measure the effect of legacy on applications to non-legacy schools. </p>
<p>I think legacies are more likely to apply early to their parent(s) universities if they like them, but how would you sort out the effect of applying early to Harvard (21% admission in the early round) from the effect of being a Harvard legacy? The sample sizes are too small, and no one looks for it.</p>
<p>This is anecdotal, but in my years of following CC, my impression is that kids who get into a highly selective legacy school typically also get into other highly selective schools as well. Sometimes even if they don’t get into the legacy school.</p>
<p>^^I concur with that impression. But the point made earlier that (many) colleges are trying harder than ever to predict who will accept admissions offers made me wonder if legacy at school A might be a negative at school B. (I have no problem with this, if it is the case).</p>
<p>For example, if a student states that his Mom went to UChicago on his Northwestern app, I wonder if NU downgrades its assessment of his NU matriculation odds and deals with his application accordingly. Or if a Penn app shows a Columbia legacy.</p>
<p>Anyway, if the survey linked below is accurate, Brown seems to be doing a pretty good job of predicting and admitting students whose first choice is Brown. Two-thirds say Brown was their first choice.</p>
<p><a href=“U. first choice for two-thirds of students, poll shows - The Brown Daily Herald”>U. first choice for two-thirds of students, poll shows - The Brown Daily Herald;
<p>
You also need to consider that Brown admits a good portion of their class via binding ED, which is primarily composed of first choice applicants. And that a good portion of the RD admits who did not have Brown at their first choice attended a different college than Brown, so they do not appear in the survey. If you assume that Brown was the first choice of nearly all of the ED admits, and Brown was not the first choice of nearly all of the admits who chose to attend a different college than Brown (I realize there are other reasons for attending different colleges, such as cost), then the rate of RD admits whose first choice was Brown drops down to ~30%, quite a difference.</p>
<p>That things have changed is one reason why I find Naviance less than reassuring in trying to estimate reach/match schools; our school’s data is for eight years, but it doesn’t differentiate the stats over time. Given that only a few kids apply from our high school to the smaller colleges every year, Naviance scattergrams aren’t any use at all, it seems to me, in accurately predicting likelihood of acceptance. My 2008 edition of Insider’s Guide gives Middlebury’s acceptance rate as 42%; it’s now 17%. And Hamilton, which from my school’s data should be a match for my kid at 40% acceptance over the last 8 years, is 27% overall for the 13-14 year; does the higher rate for our high school represent the college’s respect for our high school’s program, or an outdated tendency for New Yorkers to apply to a school that was not well-known outside of the Northeast before the USNWR ratings got to be so significant? </p>
<p>Yes…but.</p>
<p>Brown admitted 583 ED for a projected class of about 1560. </p>
<p><a href=“Brown admits 583 early decision applicants | News from Brown”>https://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2013/12/earlydecision</a></p>
<p>That is 37%. I think this is low compared to other elite ED programs (the figure of 49% for Penn sticks in my mind), but I do not have the data to prove this one way or the other.</p>
<p>So saying that the rate of RD admits at Brown who considered Brown to be their first choice is about 30% doesn’t tell me whether Brown is doing a better or worse job than other schools at predicting and admitting first choice applicants without knowing the data for the other schools. Absent further data, I am sticking with my incomplete opinion that a two-thirds overall rate and about 30% RD is pretty good.</p>
<p>@silversas
I like your post a lot. My son is looking/visiting schools we never thought he would. Some of our friends are really puzzled. They make comments that reflect how those schools were 10/20 years ago. </p>
<p>This discussion makes me wonder if there’s a similar process going on for PhD and other faculty in U.S. colleges and universities. Is there a growing pool of faculty who are very impressive (just as there’s apparently a growing pool of American college applicants who are very impressive)? If the top tier academic employers are not expanding their student populations, they might not be expanding their faculty roster. Are the “left over” impressive faculty moving down into the 2nd tier schools? I would assume so. </p>
<p>Absolutely, that’s the case. However, in the case of faculty it’s counterbalanced somewhat by students’ unwillingness to start PhDs in the first place because the outcomes are so iffy at the other end.</p>
<p>JHS, I wish that were the case, but I don’t think it is to the extent that it is really counterbalancing.</p>
<p>And of course plenty of schools are cutting tenure lines altogether rather than replacing retiring faculty. If you’re looking to save money, it is a lot easier to hire an adjunct or shift to online courses than to pay a professor’s salary.</p>
<p>It doesn’t help that because of age discrimination laws, many professors who in times past would have retired, don’t any more. It makes the crunch all the worse for up and coming students.</p>
<p>UChicago used the Uncommon App until a couple of years ago. Folks who applied there had to complete a different set of essays than the Common App, which tended to make Chicago very self-selecting. Once Ted O’Neill got out of admissions, the application process and philosophy changed somewhat.</p>
<p>IIRC, S1 had the Uncommon App, and S2 was in the first cohort of Common App (where the Chicago-type questions were part of the supplement).</p>
<p>Re the discussion about the quality of professors – I think for those students and parents who can (like CC families) it again all comes down to individually evaluating the schools and what the student wants, and looking beyond the glossy brochures. Are the profs doing research that is getting published? (Is that important to you?) For my son we (oh, heck, I mean I) made a chart of each school’s math department – how many faculty with PhD’s, how many PhD’s were in “real” math (not math education" or statistics or computers related fields), how many UPPER level math classes there were, and how many were doing or publishing research. This really helped rule out “not previously top tier schools” whose math departments would not be up to par. I also glanced at the kinds of profs they had in other departments – </p>
<p>I think you’ll find how clearly what YOU consider the right selection for your child to be (with total confusion at the margins!)</p>
<p>@dyiu13 you’re reasoning is similar to what the head of guidance told parents at my children’s NY-area public school. He said that it is so incredibly difficult to get a tenured professorship that there wasn’t much need to worry about the quality of the faculty at the non-prestige-laden schools. Now, the issue of quality teaching vs. quality research is a separate concern. But he pointed to the experiences of his own kids–one who went to a top-5 LAC and the other to a SUNY college. Both had their share of inspiring professors. The most common complaint I have heard about teaching at universities is that, particularly when it comes to intro STEM classes, the teachers are sometimes non native-English speaking adjuncts who may be difficult to understand. If teaching quality is a student’s absolute top priority then, in general, an LAC is probably the best fit.</p>
<p>Back when I was in high school, things started to change: students who, in the 1970s, would have had a great chance at HYS suddenly had “roll the (ten sided) dice” chances. </p>
<p>Now, that’s changed even more: instead one a handful of schools being like that, there are about fifty schools that are insanely hard to get into. I’ve seen some jaw-dropping admissions results.</p>
<p>I also think that what gets “forgotten” is the profs. There are so many wonderful profs…and they can’t all teach at HYPS. It was more important for me as a parent to have my kids attend colleges where they were set on fire by profs…and they are everywhere, you just have to look. So what if I was/could have been accepted everywhere I applied, after the friends I made in college, it was the profs I remember. Brand names are fine, they are a handy shortcut later in life, but what you learn endures. </p>