“Let’s not kid ourselves the bright mathy kid in Montana has a math teacher steering him or her in that direction.”
@Pizzagirl haha. I have/had one of these, now in a math PhD program. When he wanted to self study for AP Calc BC (not offered by school), the math teacher discouraged him. Then when he got a 5, the teacher was actually rather resentful. DD, taking calc at local college as a junior, has been disowned by the math department at HS. She has no idea when ACM/AIME are given, if they are given, and no one seems to care to include their likely top math student in anything.
At the “top” schools, legacies do not typically impose academic standard issues if you look at the scores, GPAs, even ECs. However, they do hinder the diversity goal all these schools claim that they REALLY want to address.
However, if the admits at the lower end of the legacy distribution were dropped in favor of better qualified (by whatever measure, test scores or otherwise) non-legacy admits, then the admit pool could still be improved.
Of course, legacy preference is more about getting alumni to keep donating, rather than improving the admit pool.
I’ve seen stated multiple times elsewhere on this site that legacy preference isn’t just about donations but often about full-pay tuition, which makes financial aid more doable for talented students from low income families. It may be part of what makes diversity possible at these universities.
And maintaining some heavy emphasis on the private college being a social club for preferred groups* due to a mix of historical inertia and maintaining as much as possible the characteristics of the college when the alums concerned attended for continued donations/alum volunteering service.
Some of this is illustrated by a few posters on past threads who’ve expressed frustration at how despite being alums, their child didn’t get admitted and as a consequence…they’ve discontinued further volunteering for their alma mater as they implicitly interpreted their child’s rejection as an ungracious slap in the face.
To be fair, the one poster who most stands out on this was one whose child was rejected despite being a legacy from a topflight elite university which is known for not weighing legacy status heavily for admission purposes.
Wealthy who can donate huge sums(million dollar buildings or tens/hundreds of thousands per year at least), applicants whose parents are well-connected and/or famous notable folks in their own right(politicians, noted scholars, pro athletes, famous Hollywood actors, prominent businesspeople, etc), athletes if we're talking Division I schools, etc.
It would be ironic to eliminate the legacy preference (to the extent it could be identified in each case) just as URMs and first-gens who were able to attend academically selective schools begin to have college-age offspring.
In a sense, a form of this has already happened in a sense.
The scope of the legacy tip has narrowed greatly over the last 50 years. Whereas in the past one can get admitted as a legacy by merely being a child of alum parents, especially if they’re well-off so long as they had a pulse*…that’s nowhere near the case anymore.
It was already narrowing when I was applying to colleges in the mid-'90s when my HS college counselor noted that one can only count on a legacy admit if one’s parents donated reasonably large sums on a regular basis and/or donated a multi-million dollar building or few. If the donation’s less than or in the neighborhood of a few hundred each year…the legacy tip is very unlikely to be a factor and the applicant would not be treated very differently from a non-legacy applicant. However, if it was the case…and there were a few even at my public magnet…their stats as the lowest GPA/SATs admitted to the particular elite private college really stood out on the admission stats** published and placed outside our HS guidance counselor’s office.
That was something Ivy/private ellte peer alums as working/lower-middle class students from public schools after the mid-'60's noticed and joked about older classes mostly admitted under the old admission system which was effectively legacy/developmental admissions on steroids.
** The stats include notes as to whether it was a legacy/developmental admit among other things.
@pizzagirl, my, you have a low opinion of Montana’s youth. Yes, there are mathy kids who grow up in places like Montana and still manage to “figure out a way to zoom ahead” even without a “math teacher steering”. And the people I know are old. It’s way easier now with so many free resources on the web. Very few schools have any teachers who can teach beyond calculus anyhow so I’m not sure what sort of “steering” even kids from good schools are getting. I went to a very good high school and when students completed calculus, the math department waved goodbye. There was no “steering”.
@ihs76, that’s pretty rotten. But sort of proves my point - that a lot of math kids do figure out ways to get around the system. If you have a kid who figures out multiplication and division on their own without being taught, most parents know that making them learn 1+1 with the other kids just isn’t going to cut it. My kid complained every, single day until he was finally allowed to go do math with the big kids.
No, mathyone. I don’t have a low opinion of Montana’s youth, at all. I have a low opinion of the extent to which outside opportunity discussions are equally distributed across rich / poor, urban / suburban / rural.
“It was already narrowing when I was applying to colleges in the mid-'90s when my HS college counselor noted that one can only count on a legacy admit if one’s parents donated reasonably large sums on a regular basis and/or donated a multi-million dollar building or few. If the donation’s less than or in the neighborhood of a few hundred each year…the legacy tip is very unlikely to be a factor and the applicant would not be treated very differently from a non-legacy applicant.”
Yes, we already know this, that the average parent who gives a couple of hundred bucks a year isn’t meaningful from a legacy consideration standpoint. Old news.
And if you truly are routinely giving six-figure / seven-figure sums, it matters not in the least whether you are actually an alum of the school in question. Plenty of buildings at schools – ranging from Average Private to Directional State Flagship to Fancy Elite U – are named after donors who never attended the school in question. And of course, frankly, it costs the same to build a dorm at a school where the average SAT is 1600 as it does at a school where the average SAT is 2100. But on CC, there’s always the assumption that donations are only made to “big-name” schools.
Unfortunately, even with all the resources on the internet, the MAA has made it very difficult to participate in the AMC if your school does not participate. And the number of schools that participated last year seems to be about 3,000, but this also includes many schools in Canada, and also a few in other foreign countries. You can compare this to the about 30,000 high schools in the United States. Btw, this number has been decreasing, with over 6,400 school participating in 1977. So if anything, the situation has gotten worse.
For AMC perhaps, though I would also argue that at least they know about it and may be able to arrange to participate if they care enough. In the old days, how would they even know about it? Look at all the free web resources available to kids with an interest in going beyond what their school offers in math–sites like Art of problem solving where the kid from Montana can find peers, Khan where they can work ahead of school, MOOCs for various advanced math topics which certainly weren’t taught in my high school, nor my kids’, quality articles in Wikipedia explaining lots of things.
Anyone else find it ironic as the elites strive for favoring the more noble, charitable, community involved, best human being, their graduates are heading in larger and larger numbers to investment banking, finance, and big consulting after graduation?
I get your point, LD, but do you have any source to support your supposition? Sure, in today’s economy, many Lit majors are struggling to find a first job, but since big business is not really growing that fast, I would be surprised if Big Consulting or WS could be.
A study on the characteristics of MIT graduates going into finance versus science, engineering, or graduate study: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/16-067_bfe1b233-366b-4c88-8a50-48f8beae89ee.pdf
(stronger students were less likely to go into finance; students who participated in social activities like fraternities and sororities were more likely to go into finance)
The type of kid that cultivates the type of life “resume” that the elites like and now want to double down on. More likely or less likely to go the finance/consulting route? Versus the kid who is as cognitively gifted, perhaps a strong passion for a subject area that he or she has vigorously and impressively pursued, but has a “resume” that otherwise looks like a high school kid?
Zoe chases prestige? Then why would she stop when it came time to find a job?
Chloe would probably not want to work there.
Doe will work there if it appeals to her and won’t if it doesn’t.
The firm will take either Zoe or Doe but remember Zoe is willing to work all night and Doe might or might not.
Well, this is why they want a mix. One has got to be pretty stupid to think that this new pronouncement means that every single accepted student will have done awesome amounts of community service. There will still be plenty of room for the introverted genius who spends all his time in the lab or whatever. It is a MIX that is desired.