Hi, I’m a rising senior from a mid-tier boarding school w/ a 1520 SAT and 3.7 UW GPA (major grade deflation at school). I am a 9-time legacy at Harvard going back 4 generations (great-great-grandfather attended), although there were no massive donations to the school from our family. Can someone tell me how much this would affect my admissions chance? Would it be worth going REA?
Each college is free to define legacy as it seems fit. Harvard considers it legacy only if a parent attended Harvard College. Your grandparents don’t count. A parent attending grad school doesn’t count.
If a parent attended Harvard College, by all means apply REA. It may help an application that is already stellar, but it is no guarantee
I don’t know about Harvard, but I worked with a student last year whose parent, several uncles, and grandfather all attended Princeton. The student was denied. Legacy admissions are definitely not the hook they used to be.
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Do you submit scores if you are slightly below middle 50% range at a school or go test optional? - #26 by Data10 suggests that those academically rated 3 (typical applicant) had a 18% admit rate during the lawsuit period if they were LDC, but <1% if they were non-ALDC and non-URM. Those rated academically rated 4 or 5 (below average applicant) had only a 3% admit rate if they were LDC, essentially 0% for any other non-athlete hook (or lack thereof) situation.
Page 19 of https://www.harvard.edu/admissionscase/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/06/2019-10-30_dkt_672_findings_of_fact_and_conclusions_of_law.pdf describes what the academic ratings of 1 to 5 mean. It seems unlikely that a 3.7 HS GPA will result in a rating of 1 or 2, despite the SAT score that may fall into the 2 description. If you apply and they rate you as a 3 for academics, you would have a non-trivial chance of admission as a legacy, but still much more likely to be rejected than admitted (though if you are unhooked, you would essentially have no chance in that situation).
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Would having a parent be a past professor and dean help further than just legacy? Or does it all fall into the same category?
A current professor/dean would likely help incrementally. Likewise an emeritus. Otherwise, unlikely.
You are likely not the first Harvard Legacy family to attend your boarding school. I’d be asking this question of my college counselor!
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In the end if Harvard is your top choice - Apply.
No point in questioning bcuz it’s all an unknown til you get in or not.
If you apply restricted yes that impacts. Good luck
Since there is no part of the application where Harvard lineage is recorded except if one or both parents attended Harvard College (or Radcliffe if sufficiently old!), the only way that readers would know your family history is if you chose to use some of the valuable free response real estate in your application to communicate that you are, as you describe it, a “9-time legacy.”
Consider what the likely effects of doing so would be. First, rather than letting the reader know who YOU are, you would be highlighting others (your family members, some deceased I would assume) instead. Second, you would be further establishing that your family background is very privileged, and, thus, your achievements and what you might bring to Harvard likely will be assessed against elevated standards.
So: since Harvard parentage is the only admissions “tip” or potential advantage as others have noted above, emphasizing your family history with Harvard is likely to work against you rather than for you.
Harvard’s stated position is that REA confers no advantage in admissions, and that the different rates of admission between REA applicants and the rest of the pool only reflects different qualifications. There is some number crunching one can do to dispute part of this, but my anecdotal observation over the years is that Harvard’s position is essentially genuine.
Good luck!