Lostaccount, I agree that legacy admits at the most highly selective colleges are “not of the same caliber as the rest in terms of academic ability and history”. They are typically stronger. These colleges admit students recognizing the context from which they have achieved and on the whole, legacy applicants come from families with better educational opportunities where academic achievement was prioritized and are from higher SES. There may be some oddball developmental admits but those are few given the millions of dollars needed to register on the scale at tippy top universities. The bottom scorers on the CDS dataset are not the legacies but rather the less advantaged kids. A 28 ACT score when you are a first gen applicant with parents who work in a factory is impressive and probably signals more achievement than the upper SES kid with lawyer parents and a 33 score. When you have an admit rate below 10% you are turning down scores of kids academically qualified to do the work. These schools are not questioning whether the bottom 25% is capable of handling the work but there is support for those that want it. At the end of the day the students at the top and the bottom as they enter all get the same degrees.