free as in Stanford is not paying taxes on its endowment and alumni donation to it are tax deductive. Not as in they don’t pay tuition.
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Not sure what the legacy fuss is about at USC and Stanford. It sometimes feels like some people don’t believe legacy kids even have the right to apply to their parents’ alma mater. Should legacy applicants get auto rejected?
Legacy matriculants were about 14% of the Classes of 2027 at Stanford and USC. They were less than 14% of these applicant pools, but have higher yield and better stats than the overall applicant pool, and virtually the same stats as all admitteds. So nothing necessarily seems amiss here (and compare this to >30% legacy at Harvard and similarly high at Princeton).
One well known admission consultant who worked at Stanford Admissions said they would “actively root against” legacy applicants, and that the only advantage they received was a mandated second pair of eyes reading the application.
As @DadOfJerseyGirl stated, “13.8% of the undergraduate class having legacy status doesn’t mean those students were admitted primarily because of their status. Correlation does not equal causation.”
Large donors, on the other hand…well, we know their kids actually get a significant boost. My guess is both schools will continue to bestow advantage to these donors and willingly take the “California DOJ website” hit if need be.
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Very true.
I have wondered about what the stats are for Harvard legacy students applying to Stanford, Stanford legacy students applying to MIT, or MIT legacy students applying to Harvard, Northeastern and Tufts. I am suspecting that just having parents who know the drill helps these kids out quite a bit even at schools where they do not have legacy status.
I am happy to see consideration of legacy slowly fade away. The fact that kids will sometimes have talents that resemble their parents is something that I do not think will ever fade away.
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So, veering a little bit off topic, sorry feel free to flag me if desired. I’ve wondered if there’s a legacy effect at all from a common “group” of schools.
The Common App asks where parents attended college and graduate school, which seems unnecessary to me when if legacy is important, the school could ask in their supplemental questions.
So if you’re applying to Bowdoin and Mom and Dad attended Williams, do you think there’s an advantage there? Is it different than Mom and Dad attended Purdue or Kansas State?
I’m definitely overthinking it but I’ve always been a little annoyed by that question, also by the parent occupation question. Seems pointless, especially for need blind schools.
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While I haven’t seen specific numbers at Stanford, that isn’t the case at other similar schools for which stats are available. For example, at time of the Harvard lawsuit, legacies composed less than 3% of applicant pool. The <3% of applicants who were legacies had a 33% admit rate, which was many times higher than non legacies, leading to 15% of admitted class being legacies. The regression analysis that controlled for other hooks and reader ratings of applicants found that being a legacy was one of the strongest analyzed non-athlete hooks. Legacies as a whole received a strong admission boost, even though legacies had as high or higher average test scores than non-legacies.
While the Harvard lawsuit is an older sample group, later published studies showed that Harvard’s legacy advantage was getting stronger over time. The number of applicants who were legacies appeared to remain similar over time, while the number of non-legacy applicants rapidly increased, so the % of applicants who were legacy decreased over time. The % of admitted class who were legacies seemed to remain roughly constant, in spite of % of legacy applicants decreasing, leading to an increasing large discrepancy between the admit rate for legacies and non-legacies.
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In her 2022 Washington Post article, Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio Jasmine Harris* stated:
“In Harvard’s Class of 2022, 36 percent of those admitted were legacy students. ”
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I expect they are referencing the freshmen survey and listing 1 - portion who have no relatives who attended Harvard – no siblings who attended Harvard, no grandparents, no aunts/uncle, no distant 3rd cousins, etc. It’s very different from how Harvard defines legacy. The full numbers for Class of 2022 are below.
14.5% – Have Parent who Attended Harvard (legacy)
36.8% – Have Relative who Attended Harvard
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Stanford and other schools in CA are required to publish number of legacy and donor admits. In last report, there were only 6 colleges in CA that reported considering legacy in admission decisions. Specific numbers for fall 2023 at Stanford are at https://irds.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj23826/files/media/file/2024_ab_697_report_1.pdf and copied below.
276 = 13% Legacies admits in fall 2023
19 = 1% Non-legacy admits with family philanthropy in fall 2023
254= 14.5% Legacies enrolled in fall 2023 (includes gap year kids)
17 = 1% Non-legacy with family philanthropy enrolled in fall 2023
The specific wording Stanford uses about preferences is quoted below. It mentions legacy and financial philanthropy are “considered”, but gives little information on degree of influence besides stating that admitted legacies and donors must be academically competitive.
In our holistic review process, applicants are evaluated based on the totality of their accomplishments and attributes, including consideration of “legacy” or philanthropic factors as described above, with academic excellence representing the primary criterion for admission. If an applicant to Stanford is not highly competitive academically, an existing family connection or historical giving to the university means nothing in the process.
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Most of the 26 national sororities no longer give a legacy preference for acceptance. It really has caused angst, especially for the alum members (not sure the kids care as much), which has lead to donations going down.
I have a friend who no longer gives any money or pays alum dues because her daughter wasn’t invited to pledge (this was before this policy). It’s really quite a large sum that would have been donated over the years.
Are there still alums who can get their daughters/granddaughters special consideration? Yes (the national president’s recommendation still has weight), and I’m sure USC and Stanford will still admit a few legacies under other categories (athletes, development, large donors). It wouldn’t even surprise me if the exact same number of legacies get in every year.
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My understanding is that this law has no teeth. Violators of the law wind up on an obscure list with no sanctions specified.
Here is a quote from USA Today:
“While the law makes a clear statement about eliminating privilege, it doesn’t offer strong mechanisms for enforcement. If schools don’t comply with it, they won’t face a financial penalty – a consequence that earlier drafts of the bill included. Instead, they’ll simply be required to publicly disclose the fact that they’re breaking the law.”
So you can expect the schools to just keep doing what they have always done. And this is a big reason why the schools have already said that “they will follow the law.” There is no downside.
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As someone who was born in the projects, and was first gen (and before I even knew it was a thing), I personally do not care about legacy admissions. Never have understood the angst. If a school wants to have legacy admissions, I’ll go somewhere else.
btw: USC easily gets around the state hit list by offering borderline legacies Spring admission.
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True the law has no teeth now it doesn’t mean in 5-6 years when there is more data that it won’t be revised.
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True. But it is just as likely that this legislation was an attempt at virtue signaling and we are at the “mission accomplished” stage. The politicians can now claim that they “did something” even though, to date, they haven’t really done much since the law has no teeth.
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The original bill threatened loss of Cal Grant funding as quoted below, which is tens of millions of $ for some colleges on the list. This portion of the bill was removed in later revisions. If there are violators, perhaps similar text will be returned.
This bill would prohibit, for applications received on or after January
1, 2025, each participating postsecondary educational institution from
giving preferential treatment in admission to an applicant because of
the applicant’s relationship to a donor or alumni of the institution in
order to be a qualifying institution for purposes of the Cal Grant
Program and the Cal Grant Reform Act.
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If private institutions are taking state or federal funds, especially in the form of financial aid payments, the government can dictate conditions to be met as an obligation under those funding awards.
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The reality is even if legacy preferences were eliminated, assuming the class that the university wants to “build” does not drastically change, the only thing that will happen is that some group of high achieving upper middle/upper class mostly white students will be replaced with a different group of high achieving upper middle/upper class mostly white students.
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Arguably state funds could be withheld, but it could be subject to legal challenges, particularly from private institutions that argue the state is overstepping its regulatory authority. California would have to pass a law first too of course, which appears to be unlikely any time soon since they had the opportunity this time around.
I imagine the likelihood of a federal law withholding financial aid to schools that consider legacy, is very far off.
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Agreed that it is more of a self-congratulatory move but the other issue here is government overreach. What other admission or general university policies might the California government believe they can set?
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Yes, which is likely why it was done but the worry here is government overreach. The schools will probably allow this ban to stand because of the bad press of fighting it but it may set a bad precedent.
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Data10’s numbers seem to be part of the lawsuit against Harvard which seems more trustworthy than some article in the Washington Post quoting a professor from another university. Also 36% seems rather high given the number of athletes and other special admits.
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