Amherst to stop offering legacy preference in admissions

1NJParent
Thu, 28 Oct 2021 21:09:45 +0000

ucbalumnus:

1NJParent:

If unhooked students form a typical bell-shaped distribution, the distribution of legacy students is likely to skew to the right (i.e. more qualified on average) but with a fatter tail on the left (meaning that there’re greater percentage of relatively less qualified students).

Applicants or admits? At a college with significant legacy preference, legacy applicants may be stronger than unhooked applicants, but legacy admits may be weaker than unhooked applicants.

I was referring to admitted students. For legacy applicants, the amount of skew to the right may not be much different. The impact of legacy boost is much greater on those legacy applicants who are academically relatively weak (i.e. those in the left tail of the distribution), as @Data10 has shown. Therefore, I expect the fatness of the left tail in the distribution of legacy admits to be more pronounced than that in the distribution of legacy applicants, relative to the respective distributions of their unhooked pools.