What makes a legacy

<p>Are you a legacy at Harvard if your parents went to the law school, or do they have to have been undergraduates there?</p>

<p>If your parents went to Harvard, you are a legacy. Harvard Law School is still Harvard... so congratulations if this is your scenario. :)</p>

<p>That is not true. It only matters if one/both of your parents went to Harvard College for undergrad.</p>

<p>Yeah, sorry...graduate school doesn't count as legacy in the college.</p>

<p>Yea, your parents had to go to Harvard college, otherwise it doesn't count.</p>

<p>Wow, that's news to me... I believe you, but that's not how I originally heard it. Never mind :)</p>

<p>does the person have to be your parent in order to be considered legacy? what if it was like, your uncle or something?</p>

<p>Parents only.
If you look at the application, there's no place for you to put down if your relatives went to the school or not for the most part.</p>

<p>Most applications ask you to give them info of your parents only- occupation, schools went to, employer etc.</p>

<p>The legacy rules differ elsewhere. At Yale, and I believe some other schools, you get legacy "credit" if parent went to a grad school. This is not so at Harvard, possibly since the grad schools are so large that it would create an impossibly large legacy pool to give "credit" to children of grad school or professional school grads.</p>

<p>In this way - as can be seen - Harvard is more "undergraduate centered!"</p>

<p>how much "credit" do your siblings get if you are doing well in College but you are no legacy?</p>

<p>I'd say based on anecdotal evidence that siblings of students do get a bit of a boost in the admissions pool, but it's hard to say how much of this is attributable simply to the fact that siblings of qualified aplicants will tend to be themselves qualified. (The same caveat applies when discussing legacies; you would expect a higher portion of legacy applicants to be admitted than the portion of the overall applicant pool---even if there were no legacy boost---because parents who were qualified applicants are more likely to have qualified kids than other parents.)</p>

<p>mitchell1015 is on target with this one. Usually, the sibling of an applicant would have gone to the same high school as the H student. This means that the application would be read by the same admissions officer (unless there was a staff turnover) that read the application of an older sibling.</p>