<p>I've heard a lot on these boards that Yale seems to have a reputation of having a lot of legacies compared to other schools. Is this true? Why would Yale be more legacied than other peer institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, which also have a high legacy admit rate? Or is this stereotype coming just from the media and pop culture.</p>
<p>from a yale alumni magazine article a few years ago, Yale's admission rate for legacies approached 30% while it was around 40% at Harvard and Princeton (I can't find the link right now, but I'll look later).</p>
<p>legacies make up about 14% of the entering freshman class - though it appears this definition of legacy is very loose and includes being the child or grandchild of an alum from ANY Yale school.
<a href="http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2004_11/q_a.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2004_11/q_a.html</a></p>
<p>That's crazy. That should mean 45+% of the applicants to Yale have legacy status.</p>
<p>Actually, it would mean only about 3.5% of Yale apps are legacies, assuming I did the math right (which I might not have, as I scribbled all my calculations in MS Paint in lieu of paper near me :-p).</p>
<p>(Actually, just looked back, that assumes all the admitted students go to Yale. Too lazy to recalculate with more variables, lol)</p>
<p>EDIT: Um, I tried it again on real paper and yeah, 45+% might be right, actually :p</p>
<p>haha shame! you should give up your yale spot to ME!</p>
<p>Yale has produced 4 of the past 6 U.S. Presidents, as well as a candidate for the White House in every U.S. election since 1972, as well as a President of Mexico, etc., etc., etc. These are very high-profile figures and the fact that they went to Yale is mentioned over and over and over.. It is true that, out of all of these famous people, a couple of them were legacies. That's probably where the media bias comes in. But the vast majority of students at Yale are not legacies and, contrary to popular belief, there is no real admissions advantage for legacies.</p>
<p>I'm actually still working on this, I have severe ADD :p</p>
<p>And Yale didn't accept me because of my awesome math skillz, Yale accepted me because of my awesome astrophysics skillz and because I can add basic numbers :)</p>
<p>PosterX - George W. Bush</p>
<p>hm, i'm a little confused about where the 45% came from. let's assume the total number of admitted students was N, and all the admitted legacies decided to come... then the number of admitted legacies is about 0.15N (I'm rounding numbers to make this easy) and if that's about 1/3 of the number that applied then about 0.45N legacies applied... but if only about 10% of all applicants were admitted, then a total of about 10N people applied, and 0.45/10 = 0.045 = 4.5%</p>
<p>or am I totally making things up?</p>
<p>... never mind me. finals are killing my ability to do mental gymnastics... :P</p>
<p>Athena, you're much closer to the truth than 45%. 45% just doesn't add up, since they're admitted at a higher rate than usual, not a lower one- hence, the percentage of applicants would have to be below the percentage of admitted students.</p>
<p>athena_wiles, here's the easiest way to look at it:</p>
<p>Well, probably not, but it works:</p>
<p>l<em>in is the number of admitted legacies, l</em>app is the number who applied. o<em>in is the number of non-legacies who got in, o</em>app is the number who applied. we'll assume everyone who got in goes, because I'm too tired to do the extra calculations :p</p>
<p>It would be way too confusing and convoluted on a forum like this so I uploaded a PDF (yay LaTeX!):</p>
<p>Um, someone tell me if the math's wrong, it was done pretty hastily. The solution is imperfect, yeah, but...well, if I knew how many accepted students chose Yale per year, then it might be a bit easier to do.</p>
<p>... I think there's a mistake in the first line of the math? ie. where you have lin/(lapp + oapp), you correctly replace the denominator with (lin + oin)/0.09, but you put lin/0.3 in the numerator, where it should be lapp/0.3. I think?</p>
<p>EDIT: sorry, I meant lapp*0.3. actually, aren't we trying to find lapp/(lapp + oapp), not lin/(lapp + oapp)?</p>
<p>EDIT#2... I think I still get 0.046 this way...</p>
<p>Yea my 45% is way off. The number of legacy applicants is actually 46% of the number of admitted students. So... around 1000 or approximately 5% of applicants.</p>
<p>haha, told you there'd probably be mistakes in my calculations. I have lapp/(lapp + oapp) on my paper, don't know why I LaTeXed it as lin in the denominator...</p>