Amherst to stop offering legacy preference in admissions

SymGol
Tue, 14 Dec 2021 04:55:02 +0000

Just to share a story to back this up. I’m a Harvard grad and have given very little to Harvard over the years. Most years I gave nothing, and some years I gave $25-100. I did give $500 the year of my 25th year reunion, a big deal for Harvard. (For the uninitiated, $500 is chicken feed to Harvard). This was also the year that my son applied to Harvard.

My son had a very strong application and applied early action. He had straight As at a very challenging magnet science school, he took very advanced math and science from a young age, he is an accomplished pianist, he had several leadership roles, plenty of evidence of being a good person, high test scores, and at least one physics teacher who wrote a letter saying that he was In the top 99.9th percentile among students this teacher had seen. He was deferred from Harvard. He applied regular decision to many other great schools, and was accepted at Princeton, Yale, Duke, UPenn, Brown, UCLA, Berkeley. He was rejected from Stanford. At RD, Harvard waitlisted him.

I don’t pretend that anyone “deserves” to be admitted anywhere, so only an evaluation here. His acceptances tell me he was the quality of student Harvard seeks (as I’m sure many applicants are). If alumni status by itself were valuable to Harvard, he would have been admitted. If an alumni boost were in the making (independent of lack of donations), it would have gotten him in. It is clearly pretty unimportant to Harvard in our case.

My son was not interested in trying to convince Harvard, so who knows if he would have gotten off the waitlist had he tried.