<p>I suspect no one really knows, not even the admissions committee as it starts its work on the regular decision round right now. In the past four years, Chicago’s applications have increased so much that it has gone from a 40% admission rate (50% EA) to a projected 25% admission rate (32% EA). So there’s a lot less room for any number of factors to make a decisive difference, including legacy. Or, put another way, when Chicago was admitting 50% or more of the students who applied EA, admitting most of the qualified legacy applicants who applied EA was probably something that happened without even paying attention. That can’t be true anymore.</p>
<p>The second reason is that until recently Chicago got comparatively few legacy applications. First, in the 60s and early 70s the headcount at the College got extremely low, below 500 per class for awhile. So the number of legacy children of those students is small relative to the size of the college. But that number is growing as children of graduates from the period after the college started expanding again begin to show up. Second, the college was uniquely unpopular with its alumni of that era. People at Chicago admit that all the time: they have many alumni saying that they steered their children away from the University because they were so miserable there, notwithstanding the quality of the education. (I know several 70s alumni who did just that.) But the University has been waging a 20-year campaign to improve undergraduate student life, and to communicate that to its alumni, and I think both efforts are well past the tipping point. So I would guess that, among the vastly increased number of applications Chicago has been receiving the past few years, there is a vastly increased, and still increasing, number of legacy applications.</p>
<p>I have never seen a clear statement of what Chicago’s legacy policy is. But whatever it is, no one has much real experience applying it, since it has probably never mattered much until very recently. In college admissions, without a bunch of people who know what the policy means to them in specific cases, you don’t really have a policy at all.</p>