<p><a href=“tokenadult:”>quote</a>
I think there is a lot of double-counting of athletes who are also legacies in some of those estimates. One person is still just one person, even if the person belongs to multiple favored categories.
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<p>That defies all logic. There is essentially no correlation between athletic ability and legacy status. If being a recruitable athlete means being in the top couple of percent of athletic ability (in whatever sport the candidate plays), take that percentage of the legacy admit pool to set a limit on how large the intersection could be. If legacies are 15 percent of the class and recruitables are 2 percent of all athletes, that’s 0.3 percent – assuming that all legacies play sports. Adjust downward for the fact that not all legacies play sports, adjust upward slightly for boutique sports of the wealthy where the selectivity is lower. The result is quite small.</p>
<p>There would be plenty of legacies for whom participation in athletics was a contribution to admission, but the numbers under discussion were the recruited athletes, a much more restricted group.</p>