Any idea of the value of legacy in applying to Yale? Parents of kids without it say that legacies are practically automatically in (obviously so far from the truth) and parents of kids with it say that it has practically no value (also obviously untrue).
Also, does the value of legacy vary between an SCEA application and a RD application? At a visit last year, I heard an admissions officer say that legacy was treated the same in each situation, but I’ve also heard people say that legacy was only considered when applying SCEA.
So much confusion! Does anybody have any information that they feel confident about?
Legacy is a slight consideration – see it as a tipping factor if all other things are equal. Given the miniscule numbers of admits, that doesn’t amount to much. Legacy apps who are initially rejected get an additional review – just in case.
EA or RD doesn’t matter, in my experience. You should believe what the admissions officer said.
These days, Yale admits ~20% of its legacy applicants - which means, of course, that ~80% are rejected. Those are obviously much better odds than for non-legacy applicants, but the legacies as a group tend to have better stats than the overall pool and their backgrounds often are conducive to more-competitive applications. Similarly, SCEA applicants have a higher admit rate (mid-to-high teens) than RD applicants (low-to-mid single digits), but the SCEA applicant pool is higher-quality overall. If you reasonably believe you’re a competitive Yale applicant and you’d happily go to Yale, apply early to maximize your odds, but recognize that just based on the number of applicants you’re much more likely to be deferred or rejected than accepted.
You will never be able to get a clear answer to this question, because it’s in Yale’s interest for alumni to think that their kids will get a significant advantage, and for other applicants to think that it’s not a significant advantage. My belief is that it’s an advantage, but one that might, say, counterbalance a couple of Bs on the transcript.
From what I understand, Yale counts kids of graduate school alums (as well as Yale College alums) as legacies for college admission, which seems like it may dilute the impact of legacy compared to schools that only count kids of college alums for this purpose.
Good question on early vs.regular as I believe there schools (such as Penn) that only consider legacy in the early round - sounds like not at Yale from the posts above though.
As an argument for little or no effect: Inside word from both Harvard and Yale for years has been that the admission rates for children of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alumni at both colleges are not meaningfully different. Of course, each college only grants a preference and special review to its own legacies, but applicants who would be legacies at comparable institutions effectively function as a control group to determine how much of the legacy preference is really a preference and how much it is just a reflection of the fact that children of smart, relatively well-to-do people who are sophisticated about higher education and value it tend to have stronger than average applications. And my understanding is that the pure “legacy” effect is at most a couple of percentage points.
Among my kids’ friends and my friends’ kids, many legacies accepted at Yale who also applied elsewhere (lots of those accepted SCEA didn’t) were accepted essentially everywhere they applied, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT. Some legacies rejected at Yale were accepted at Harvard, Oxford, or Princeton. I know accepted legacies on full financial aid and rejected legacies whose parents had given $1 million+ to Yale over the years, so it’s not all about money, either (although in the case of some ultra rich families, it maybe mostly is).