Any other super qualified legacy applicant got rejected by Yale
My S got deferred in EA and rejected in RD
Sat 2370 (1st attempt)
Sat 2: 800 x2
15 APs: 14 5s and one 4
IB Diploma recipient
One major award in a national competition
Varsity basketball team captain and MVP x 3 yrs
President of DECA x 2 yrs and other great ECs
Essays: great by my standard
Recommendation letters: cannot be bad as he got accepted by Harvard and Dartmouth
Are there other super qualified legacy students on this forum who got rejected by Yale?
I hope Yale Admission Office knows what they are doing.
In the forseeable future, my checkbook will closed to Yale. If my S chooses Harvard over Dartmouth, Which he is leaning towards, my donations will follow. I come to realize why Harvard's endowment is much bigger than Yale's.
Last edited by bulldog2000; 04-06-2012 at 05:21 AM.
First of all, congrats to your son. He is headed to a great college and to a great future afterward.
Secondly, as a Harvard legacy applying SCEA in the fall, the fact that such a qualified legacy to HYP was rejected is a little scary...
Third, I hope that after the initial shock wears off, you will feel more at peace with his rejection. He was accepted to Harvard and Dartmouth. That's so exciting!! Try to lose the bitterness- there are so many good things about this situation that it doesn't really do any good to focus on the comparatively small bad aspects. Legacies aren't guaranteed admission, or even anywhere close to it. There are so many qualified applicants, and Yale can't accept all of them. There are thousands of kids who would kill to be in his position. Again, congrats to him!
At this level, admissions is highly subjective, and legacy is at best a weak tip. Yale and Harvard routinely deny admission to legacies, and I don't think either school is worrying about the hit to its endowment created by legacy rejections (unless the family has endowed a building, in which case the kid's not a legacy, but a hooked development case).
Congratulations to your son on his excellent admissions results.
OP,
I understand your feelings - the result is very surprising!
I have wondered whether legacies can actually be disadvantaged by their status at some point, due to colleges not wanting their stats to show they admit *too many* legacies. It could be that Yale had so many stellar legacy applicants this year, and your S was competing only against them and not the regular pool.
He is obviously a fantastic student - congrats to him and you for his H and D admissions!
Everyone is right. I should just chill out. College admission is now a totally different game from when I was applying. It is now so random and unpredictable. It all depends on your main reader, your regional adm officer. Thinking from a different perspective, they have a difficult task to choose 2K from 30K plus applications. With this kind of competition, legacy status is likely just a small feather on the scale.
I thought about contacting Yale Undergraduate Admission Office, but decided not to. There is no point at this time point.
Nevertherless, Yale is still my alma mater and I should be loyal to her. They probably do not care about losing small donors anyway.
Good perspective, bulldog. And I agree: If I were in your shoes, I would no longer donate to Yale, either! Best of luck to your son. He has enviable choices.
This is a good one to trot out when people talk about how legacies get such a boost. It just isn't true. And it's not at all surprising that a legacy rejected by Yale gets accepted at Harvard with no legacy status. I have seen that happen a couple of times (and vice versa).
^ Yet I wonder sometimes about a legacy bias against students at peer schools. Perhaps a peer school or one a notch lower is thinking that this applicant is strong enough to get in to our school and certainly as a legacy to the parents' school so we should turn them down and protect our yield. This obviously was not the case with the OP.
I recall a piece by either Jeff Brenzel or Rick Levin a few years back when it was said that more than 50% of legacy applicants from parents in the highest categorized consistent annual giving level were being turned down. We know that legacy applicants are already stronger than the average applicant and students from this more selective category presumably looked even better having access to every conceivable test prep resource, top notch school district, summer activities, cultural exposure, private music lessons, etc. that money could buy. Legacy status, even for the big donors, isn't what it used to be.
I see lot of high stat kids get rejected from different schools because they didn't put a lot of effort into their essays. I'm not saying this was the case with your son, but many others thought their stats would get them in. Is it possible your son felt between his stats and the legacy status that it wasn't necessary to put great effort into crafting his essays? How much actual time did he spend on them? At least he does have two Ivies to choose from. Many others with similar stats were rejected from all the Ivies they applied to. I think it's safe to say with what he has already achieved in high school, he will be successful wherever he chooses to go.
^Yale, Harvard, and Dartmouth all use the Common App. Presumably the OP's son's main essays were identical for all three schools -- and strong enough to earn acceptances at H and D.
This process is highly subjective, and not at all predictable when it comes to the most selective colleges.
Each school has their own supplemental essays so there should be variance from one school to the next.
The Common Application and Yale Supplement give you the opportunity to tell us more about your background, activities, interests, and motivation for applying to Yale. You are asked to write two essays on topics of your choice and to write about your extracurricular activities in the spaces provided. Write openly and honestly about activities, interests, or experiences that have been meaningful to you. Most importantly, write in your own voice about topics that you are passionate about. If an essay doesn't sound like the person who writes it, it will not work well as a personal statement. We read essays very carefully and try to get a full sense of the human being behind them.
I believe the Harvard supplement is very simple compared to the Yale supplement and may not require additional essays beyond what you write for the common app. It is possible that a strong effort on the common app essays and then a lackluster effort on the supplements for these two schools would only show on the Yale application. I'm not saying this was the issue for the OP although I can say students have PM'd me and requested I read their already submitted essays and some are surprisingly poor in the context of their objective stats.
Harvard has an optional space for essay or anything else you want to say about yourself. I understood Dartmouth has no additional essays and so both Harvard and Dartmouth can be filed with very little additional effort.
