I agree that the FGLI bucket is limited because fin aid is limited at most schools. But…most schools are actually need blind (as an example, the vast majority of publics are need blind), it’s just that most don’t come close to meeting a student’s full need.
I am not sure how the set of meet-full-need schools (the schools we are primarily talking about when considering legacy and other hooks) shakes out between need-blind and need-aware for US students, but even the need-blind ones have their proxy-for-income data points in the admission process that allow them to make a decent estimate of need. I also agree the need-blind/meet full need schools tend to have more resources than need aware/meet full need schools.
One version of this is “Alex J. Keaton Syndrome” which posits that if your parents went to a very liberal LAC in Connecticut then, as a form of rebellion, you would tell them you prefer to go to Stanford instead.
That is my conclusion too. I have seen this happen several times - the kids got WL at the others. Last year on CC there was a double legacy who didn’t even apply and when the college counselor dug into the poor results AOs said they assumed the very high STAT student was going to Princeton.
Every donation of significance has to be known for the tax forms and the auditors. The donation can be listed as “Anonymous” for public consumption, but the Auditors will demand to see the paper trail where the donor pledges/sends money with the request/condition that it be listed as Anonymous.
Given that so few legacies actually attend Wesleyan, it seems likely that the school does not enjoy any of the perceived benefits of having legacies on campus and thus does not care if it has those 2 dozen students or not. If it doesnt get any benefits ( whether community/continuity/donations/networking/ or job placement help or whatever) it is easy to give it up.
Beyond the sampling of colleges across a range of selectivity mentioned by @shawk, Wesleyan encounters formidable competition for students from highly selective schools such as Swarthmore, Brown and five or so other NESCAC LACs. Wesleyan legacies qualified for these other schools may simply prefer one or more of them to Wesleyan.
Another factor AOs consider is whether the applicant will succeed at the school in comparison to other applicants. For example, a URM legacy may be more likely to make the adjustment to the campus and the college’s geography vs other similarly situated applicants. The legacy pool could be helpful in rounding out the class with students who will be able to quickly adjust and help build the community.
Wouldn’t a “less qualified” legacy need more “adjustment” to begin with than a “more qualified” non-legacy s/he replaced? If a college should favor students who may be more familiar with the college (so they would “adjust” better), shouldn’t the college favor applicants who are local?
Wesleyan receives on average between 20-30% more applications a year than Hamilton, Bowdoin, or Middlebury. Of those three, Bowdoin closely matches Wesleyan in its legacy enrollment: ~5%. Based solely on the number of potential overlaps, I’d peg Amherst, Williams and Brown as the most likely suspects.
Wait. What? I think the key here is that Wesleyan values all of those things as “icing on the cake”, if you will, but not to the point where legacy status will be an actual tie-breaker (if, it ever was.) The president’s statement makes that clear. There is, however, an annual photo-op of all the legacies and their kin on move-in day. I suspect that will continue.
Why would that continue if the School no longer cares about legacies as a group? I assume they don’t have a photo op of all the kids from Connecticut or other subgroups?
I thought we established that legacy, as a group, is not “less qualified.”
I also want to point out that big donor is not the same as legacy, even if occasionally they are the same.
@simba9 while standards are not bent for run of the mill legacy and they often are for the Jared Kushners of world, those numbers are SO small. The reality is that the positive impact a new building far outweighs the negative impact of a couple of weak students in a class.