<p>Legacy is tough because it’s simply not a shoe-in. A kid who can’t keep up with the classwork, isn’t socially well integrated, or blows through his app leaving all sorts of worrisome hints- isn’t an auto. The kid with the B+ average isn’t an auto. But, legacy can indicate the kid knows the school well, has a better view of the rigors, opportunities and social climate than your ordinary kid just aiming for some “top school” who barely got past the national rep.</p>
<p>With the talk about legacy status you may enjoy the following article.</p>
<p>[Post-</a> Stigmatriculation](<a href=“http://post.browndailyherald.com/2011/03/03/stigmatriculation/]Post-”>http://post.browndailyherald.com/2011/03/03/stigmatriculation/)</p>
<p>I would love to see data that shows of the legacies admitted, how many of those kids also were the full pays, children of “development cases”, legacy plus sports or special talent admit, etc.</p>
<p>I don’t think being a plain vanilla legacy helps you- dads a social worker, mom’s a public defender, good school system and high socio-economic status but needing some aid to attend. An ordinary legacy? Yawn.</p>
<p>As I read through this thread, a new acronym came to mind:</p>
<p>BOMSI</p>
<p>Beware of Mom-Supplied Information</p>
<p>@ intlstudent—Stanford isn’t a ED school, but a restrictive EA school and students can apply to as many RD schools as they want. You are not committed.</p>
<p>mom2collegekids-</p>
<p>A DOA at a liberal arts college explained their method to me recently. This school admits less than a 1/4 of applicants and is not need blind but pledges to meet full need.</p>
<p>The applications are read and ranked without any FA information on the table. For the sake of this discussion we’ll call the rankings 1-10. First the applicants who scored a 1 are admitted, then the twos, balancing for factors like gender and geographic diversity. For these top 2 tiers admissions is essentially need blind. It’s only when the committee gets to the 3s that they get information from the FA office on individual applicants and start to look at how much of the budget they’ve used up. At this point FA does become a factor. While in the first two groups applicants are admitted regardless of how much FA they need, in group three the committee might choose to admit 3 students who require partial aid rather than a single student who needs full support. Once the FA budget has been used up only full pay applicants can be admitted. So as I understand it, the most attractive students will be admitted regardless of how much support they need, while the more borderline students can be hurt by the need for aid.</p>
<p>Some schools choose a different method, admitting students regardless of FA requests but then apportioning the limited FA budget among all FA applicants. This can result in the infamous admit/deny situation, where students are offered a place at the institution, but without enough FA to attend.</p>
<p>m2ck, I agree with Sue’s conclusion that admissions being need-blind for the first chunk of admits, then going to need-aware, means that the top picks get in regardless of need. </p>
<p>sybbie, not sure that I’d call these kinds of schools need aware/need sensitive. The schools could adjust their need-assessing model so that the family contribution increases enough so that all of the admissions decisions could be considered need-aware. But then the admitted student FA packages aren’t as generous, and more students are gapped, and the students go elsewhere (or take out loans). </p>
<p>I like transparency here. If being full-pay is going to be an admissions tip, and the family can handle it by stretching slightly, they should know that. If someone seeking FA is on the bubble for admissions, they can adjust their expectations regardless of what the net price calculator says is the package they’d get.</p>
<p>Being full pay certainly conferred an advantage on my oldest. I’m sure of this. Obviously she had other very desirable creative and academic talents, which showed up outside as well as inside school. But, the only explanation for her being accepted to every school she applied to is being full pay. Otherwise, statistically, she should have gotten some rejections.</p>
<p>I imagine, given the length of the economic downturn, that being full pay is an even larger advantage, today. Heck, even the state schools are flat out open about the fact that they are admitting more oos students in order to make more non-profit money.</p>
<p>I imagine the best situation for acceptance is being full pay and ED and a legacy, if you are not creatively or athletically hooked. Certainly anecdotal evidence, which is all that is actually available, would point to this fact.</p>
<p>Schools like Northwestern, I bring this up only because the school has already been mentioned several times in this thread, are now admitting 40% of their class ED. The admit rate for ED is significantly higher than for RD. The admit rate for the highly selective SCEA schools is much higher in the early round than in the RD round.</p>
<p>To some extent, it is clear that the sheer volume of applications these places are attempting to process has left them in a state of attempting to figure out who will actually attend and who will not. Schools which do not publish wait list numbers are not playing fair, but, past a certain point, this is a game to them, competitve. </p>
<p>If the schools did not publish articles each year trumpeting and celebrating their ever-shrinking admit percentages, I would not believe it was a kind of game. But, this kind of “EliteU had the lowest admit rate ever in the history of man” headline gives us some indication as to how they are “playing” and this is no different than the schools who recruit to win football games. It is just a different kind of trophy they choose to wrestle for, and it doesn’t have all that much to do with education, imho.</p>
<p>I suspect that even BWRK with parents of modest means have better chances as legacies. But if you are talking about schools with single digit admit rates the odds are still stacked against you and there’s certainly no way to know if full-pay played any part in it.</p>
<p>And I agree that if ad coms think that zip codes or private school can predict how rich you are - they’d be mistaken. My zip code has both houses worth over a million and public housing. Private schools always have at least a handful of scholarship students.</p>
<p>My full pay kids got plenty of rejections BTW. :)</p>
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I feel that it always has to be mentioned that these figures don’t actually tell you if there is any advantage to being a legacy, because to really tell you’d have compare the stats of legacy applicants as a pool to those of unhooked applicants. Schools will often say that legacy applicants have, on average, better stats than the overall pool. They don’t usually get more specific than that, for sensible PR reasons. (That is, it’s to the school’s advantage for alumni to overestimate the value of the legacy hook, and for everybody else to underestimate it.)</p>
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<p>I wonder when they applied. Mine graduated highschool 09, and I do not believe the full impact of the downturn was understood, but it was there. Now, with it having gone on as long as it has, I get the impression that more and more students are reaching for the “affordable option” in college matriculation. </p>
<p>The first year I read this board, as a lurker, before I joined and posted, I read many posts that indicated that borrowing for the best possible school was a good idea. It was considered a “debatable” subject, at any rate.</p>
<p>Now, not so much.</p>
<p>I imagine this attitude of cost awareness has, at least to some extent, changed the landscape of how acceptances are made. It is not insignificant if students will not borrow to fund their education. The schools must find the customers who will pay, with the few exceptions of a handful of lottery schools, they simply have to be able to bill some of their customers. They are not all endlessly endowed.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.adminplan.northwestern.edu/ir/sspg/cirp/TFS_2011_PDF_PROFILE.pdf[/url]”>http://www.adminplan.northwestern.edu/ir/sspg/cirp/TFS_2011_PDF_PROFILE.pdf</a></p>
<p>If you go to page ten of this report, which is a comparison between NU and its peers, you will see that well over half of their accepted students are in the upper middle class range. All of these institutions. It’s actually staggering how low the numbers really are for the underpriveledged, in spite of what the PR guys might want you to believe.</p>
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<p>But wait! I thought the biggest problem with college admissions was all those underqualified URM’s getting in and taking the spots of the rightful deserving kids from Scarsdale and Highland Park and Greenwich! Aren’t there 2,000 threads to that effect on CC?</p>
<p>I agree fully with blossom that it is the height of hubris to claim that you know why a certain kid got in or didn’t get in, or that a given kid “would have gotten in if he’d not asked for finaid” or whatever.</p>
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<p>Or, to stats of those who are legacies at similar-schools (e.g., the stats and acceptance rates of Yale legacies at Harvard) Because one would expect the Harvard legacy pool to be both a) more likely full-pay and b) higher stats than the applicant pool in general – but likely comparable to the pool of Yale legacies (or other elite school legacies).</p>
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<p>Exactly. But, basically, what this comes down is – everyone bemoans the particular hooks and / or qualifications that THEIR kid doesn’t have. If your kid is a 2400, it’s a travesty that the 2300 got in. If your kid is white, it’s a travesty that the black kid down the street got in. If your kid is a legacy, it’s a travesty that Dear Old Alma Mater passed him by. Blah blah blah. It’s whiny and unattractive. And if these schools have oh-such-undeserving-and-undesirable student bodies, then why, again, do you want your superior child to go there?</p>
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<p>Notre Dame is a school that has legacies up the wazoo – I mean, there are entire families who send their kids there – and man, they’ve got some huge loyalty. For those of you who aren’t (physically) close to Notre Dame or who don’t see their alums – their loyalty is really quite unsurpassed, IMO. I think that’s a nice feature of the school, myself.</p>
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<p>I would submit that if you are the kid of an actor at that level, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a legacy or not. Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Mikhail Baryshnikov all sent their kids to my alma mater, which is more than happy to have them all there, and I hardly doubt they cared that they weren’t legacies.</p>
<p>I don’t see the argument for why it’s helpful to colleges if legacies overestimate their kids’ chances. I think it’s the other way around - they’d rather legacies have a realistic picture of their kids’ chances going in, because that leads to less disappointment down the road when/if the kids aren’t admitted. I’ve been assuming that this is why some highly selective colleges offer a few hours of free college counseling to children of alums, and why some selective colleges invite alums and their children to come talk to admissions before they apply.</p>
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<p>Given that I have never once mentioned URM’s in any post, I have no idea why you would quote me as your strawman to knock down.</p>
<p>It is the height of hubris to try to figure out what is going on with college acceptances? Why? </p>
<p>What else is the point of this site? </p>
<p>Given the premise that GC’s are not responsible for getting kids the information they need, then who else besides their parents can get them this information? If it isn’t looked at, realistically, how can parents give realistic information to thier kids?</p>
<p>it is the height of arrogance to believe these questions do not matter to those who will be applying next year just because it doesn’t matter to you. What else besides the college application and acceptance process is more important on this site? Sheet size? Restaurants in the area? all worthy questions but certainly not the reason people find CC.</p>
<p>You can draw general conclusions, but you can’t conclude for any one given kid (absent something egregious, of course). You cannot conclude, for example, that JNSQ’s daughter would have or should have gotten into NU “except for the fact that she needed finaid.” If my legacy kid hadn’t gotten into NU - we would have been highly disappointed, for sure - but there would be nothing to “attribute” it to other than - well, he just hadn’t made the cut this year. There’s nothing more to it. Everyone keeps trying to predict. You can’t predict this kind of process. All you can do is set yourself up as best as you can and play the hand you’re dealt.</p>
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<p>To that effect, I read something on CC from a parent who had gone to some elite school (not sure which one), his/her child had applied to that school, and they sent some kind of mailing to legacy-applicant-kids/parents to the effect that it’s rough out there and while we like our legacies, there is no guarantee of anything - and this parent was horribly offended by that communication. So they can’t win for losing, it seems.</p>
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<p>I completely agree with this.</p>
<p>It is in everyone’s best interest to fully understand the hand they have been dealt in order to be able to play it as well as they can.</p>
<p>And, the only way to understand how to play that hand, in any poker game, is to understand the odds. Those who understand the odds in college acceptances, as well as in no-limit hold-'em, are going to be in the best position to understand the best way to play to get the best results.</p>