<p>•The relative advantage of being an alumni child has gone up rapidly in the last 20 years. In 2009, Princeton admitted 41.7 percent of “legacy” applicants (alumni children), 4.5 times the rate for non-legacies. In 1992, the legacy admit rate was only 2.8 times the rate for others. </p>
<p>•Many elite colleges encourage legacy applicants to use early decision programs that increase their odds of admission. One institution Golden identifies only as a Southern university admits 75 percent of early decision applicants (most of them legacies or siblings of students) but has a 21 percent admission rate for everyone else. The University of Pennsylvania offers “maximum consideration” for alumni children who apply early decision.</p>
<p>•While many associate legacy admissions with Ivy League and elite Northeastern private colleges, the practice has a much wider reach, with most competitive public universities offering some benefit (frequently consideration on par with in-state applicants for out-of-state legacy applicants, a designation that can mean a huge boost). Further, faith-based institutions tend to have very high rates, Golden writes. He notes that Calvin College tends to have classes that are 40 percent alumni children. And at the University of Notre Dame, nearly one-fourth of students are alumni children – resulting from a 50 percent admissions rate for such applicants, double the university’s overall rate.</p>
<p>I do agree that it can be a hook for some colleges.</p>
<p>This maybe true for the elite colleges, but like anything else, it is how posters perceived the OP. The OP said not the building donated legacy, but just a traditional legacy. To me, that doesn’t mean she was questioning elite colleges, but the traditional colleges in general.</p>
<p>There is a huge difference being a legacy of OSU and a legacy at ND. There is also a difference of being a legacy at the Citadel and a legacy at USC (South Carolina). A lot has to do with the profile that school wants in their programs. </p>
<p>Being an athlete and implying to UPENN is not going to pull the same weight with admissions as being the National Champ for HS Robotics contest. </p>
<p>The point I have been trying to make is that it is the WHOLE STUDENT, not just one aspect, such as legacy when it comes to the BFE.</p>
<p>As I have stated there are many personal anecdotes on this thread alone to say, Don’t bank on being a legacy for admittance. </p>
<p>Please read further down in the link
</p>
<p>It implies it is not so much about legacy, but the $$$ tied to legacy. I would have loved to have seen the study of those Princeton or the ND legacy children regarding how much their parent donated.</p>
<p>Again the OP said not the building donation type of legacy.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone here would say that the big buck donor with a legacy child is the same as the 500 buck a yr legacy child.</p>
<p>I’ve always known that Princeton had a much higher admit rate for alumni children - didn’t realize it was 41% in 2009! Last I knew it was in the high 20’s. Given that the overall admit rate in 2009 was just shy of 10% (including the alumni 40%) – well, you can do the math . . .</p>
<p>another interesting tidbit from the article (under the section entitled ‘extra assistance for white people’):</p>
<p>“…The new book takes on that assumption as well, noting that despite now having numerous cohorts of minority alumni who are old enough to have college-age children, the legacy preference pool isn’t just overwhelmingly white, but disproportionately so. For instance, in an essay by John Brittain of the University of the District of Columbia, and Eric Bloom, a lawyer, they note that in 2002, 17.8 percent of admitted Harvard applicants were either black, Latino or Native American. But only 7.6 percent of legacy admits came from those groups.”</p>
<p>“I’ve always known that Princeton had a much higher admit rate for alumni children - didn’t realize it was 41% in 2009!”</p>
<p>I didn’t know that either, if we did maybe D2 would have taken a flier at it four years ago ! Though, now that I recall, they didn’t seem to have much in the area she was most interested in, at the time.</p>
<p>The admissions rep I spoke with evidently gave me some bad info, or they have since changed their policies. I asked her, at the time, if grad school alumni kids were given legacy status there. She said yes but,[in effect] legacy status wasn’t worth hardly squat there.</p>
<p>What percentage of those Princeton legacies would have been admitted if there were no legacy preference at all? You can’t really “do the math” without knowing this. There is certainly no reason to assume that it would be just 10%. I would imagine that the children of Princeton grads tend to be a pretty strong pool.</p>
<p>One reason is that it used to be much bigger factor, and people’s impressions haven’t changed with the facts.</p>
<p>Another is that people love to come up with an excuse for why a wonderful kid didn’t get accepted, and blaming it on the underqualified URMs or legacies or athletes makes them feel better.</p>
<p>I’ve never taken statistics, but even I see the problem with this one: “In 2009, Princeton admitted 41.7 percent of “legacy” applicants (alumni children), 4.5 times the rate for non-legacies. In 1992, the legacy admit rate was only 2.8 times the rate for others.”</p>
<p>What changed was not the legacy admit rate – which has probably stayed steady at around 40% – but the regular admit rate dropped. It’s even possible that the legacy acceptance rate has decreased, that it used to be higher than 41%, but the overall acceptance rate has fallen so low and the legacy rate hasn’t fallen as much.</p>
<p>I’m familiar with Brown’s acceptance figures. For a long time – through much of the 80s and 90s – Brown’s legacy acceptance rate was twice the overall rate. So that if the overall rate was 25%, about 50% of legacies got in. Then as the number of applications rose, both rates dropped – but the overall rate dropped substantially more. </p>
<p>Brown has been accepting approximately one-third of legacy applicants for the last six or seven years – which is much less than the 50% rate of 20-odd years ago. So on the one hand, from the legacy perspective the legacy boost is not as great as it used to be. But on the other hand. the legacy acceptance rate is now more than 3 times that of the overall rate, so to non-legacies it looks like they get a huge boost.</p>
<p>I wonder what effect–if any–coeducation has on these legacy rates. Princeton, for example, graduated its first women in about 1973. So the first children of alumnae probably began applying in the very late 1990s or early 2000s (somebody check my math). I’m not sure whether this makes any difference.</p>
<p>Daughters are legacy at Stanford. Stanford makes a formal determination of legacy status when you apply, and both girls got letters declaring them to be legacies.</p>
<p>D1 - did not apply SCEA but was accepted RD.
In HS she was Sal with high SATs and solid musical ECs.</p>
<p>D2 - applied to Stanford SCEA but was deferred and then rejected in RD.
In HS she was Val with slightly higher grades than D1 but slightly lower SATs and stronger musical ECs.</p>
<p>If you look at D1’s results you’d say yes, legacy probably helped her. But if you look at D2’s results you’d say wow, legacy must not be much of a boost at Stanford if a kid with qualifications that strong gets rejected.</p>
<p>Interesting question, Hunt. Perhaps the women grads from Princeton (cf Elena Kagin) were childless at higher rates than the men grads. Also to the extent Princeton women married Princeton men, the potential number of legacies is further reduced. Who knows, perhaps Princeton is actually exprerienceing a legacy shortage.</p>
<p>Everyone needs to read the Higher Ed article, thanks Canuckuy. </p>
<p>One thing it points out is that the pull of legacies has gone up in the last 20 years. It is not becoming less important!</p>
<p>Anecdotal stories, I believe, create the myths. If your kid, neighbor, friend…didn’t get in, it proves legacy isn’t a boost. Yet as a counselor, I rarely guessed wrong about whether a legacy would get in or not at any school. How adcom view legacy applicants became very clear to me.</p>
<p>And the legacy boost is bigger at the non elites. They need the loyalty-potential money-more and they don’t have the ability to create the socially engineered classes ivies do. 50 legacies from Boston suburbs are just fine. At LACs rated below 20, legacy applicant would have to be deemed unable to make it through to be rejected.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I suspect coeducation had two main effects. First, it automatically and instantly doubled the number of potential legacy applicants. I remember thinking at the time that opposition to coeducation would disappear as the alumni’s daughters and granddaughters applied to college, and I was right. Second, the Ivy League colleges all experienced significant expansion around coeducation, since for political reasons they were reluctant to cut back on the number of men they enrolled until the 1980s. Everyone’s class size increased 25-33%. So that wound up significantly increasing the number of eligible legacies, too.</p></li>
<li><p>Marriages between alumni may produce fewer potential legacy applicants than if the spouses had married non-alumni separately, but I’ll bet that marriages between alumni produce more legacy candidates who actually apply.</p></li>
<li><p>My favorite recent (sort of recent) Princeton legacy story: Student goes to a great private school that sends 20%+ of its class to Ivies every year. The school doesn’t rank, but makes clear that this is one of the 4-5 top students that year. (The others: Yale SCEA (legacy), Stanford SCEA (legacy), Amherst ED (no hook at all), Penn ED (faculty kid, sibling)). Student’s father, grandfather, and older sibling are involved Princeton alums. Student applies ED to Princeton (the last year Princeton had ED) and is rejected outright, not even deferred. Has to be content with an RD acceptance from Harvard, a school the student never even thought about applying to until the Princeton rejection came.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>If a third generation legacy who is qualified enough to be accepted by Harvard applies ED and gets rejected . . . then legacy just can’t mean much. And that was a number of years ago; things have gotten tougher since.</p>
<p>(Also note, for you private school fans out there: The five arguably top students in this class never competed with one another anywhere. Four of them only ever submitted one application, and the fifth would have submitted only one if Princeton had come through ED. The only college that even saw more than one application from this group was Yale, since the Princeton rejectee applied there, too, but only after the classmate had been accepted.)</p>
<p>Perhaps legacy helps to some degree in some situations, but it is wrong to assume a legacy admit got in because they were a legacy. It is not fair to the kid who worked hard and earned a spot somewhere on their own merit when others devalue their acceptance by shouting “legacy.” As others have said, legacy kids are a strong pool of applicants, legacy kids are more likely to apply, etc. so comparing admit rates and class percentages is not as telling as one might first assume. There is no way to know if legacies would NOT have gotten in without legacy status. Should my kid be fortunate enough to get into his “reach for everyone” legacy school, it would break his heart to have others think it was not deserved. Legacies usually don’t help with diversity (a whole different thread) or bring glory on the playing field; all but a very few donate buildings (or the like), so please don’t make assumptions about why they got in. HYPSM have enough applicants and endowment money to build a class without unfair favoring of legacies.</p>
<p>Simple question. Did your guesses only place “legacy” into the equation? In other words, how many of those legacies would have gotten in on their OWN steam? Are you stating the kid with below avg stats got into the school because they were a legacy?</p>
<p>If so, please write up a list, so parents on CC that are alumni now know the safety school since it doesn’t matter if they gave one penny, just because they are alumni their kid is in.</p>
<p>I will also be sure to tell the parents at the next college football games (for the 2 different colleges our children attend), who are alumni, no worries, your next kid is in, even if they are below the stats because they are legacies.</p>
<p>I don’t think your post meant to infer that, but that is how it came across to me.</p>
<p>No, D1 chose Harvard. And I’ve often wondered whether that affected D2’s chances at Stanford. No way to really know. D2 is five years younger; would they really hold a grudge that long? Also, D2 showed greater love for Stanford than D1 did by applying SCEA, but to no avail.</p>
<p>bulletandpima you seem to be arguing that we all think that legacy means you are guaranteed in. I don’t think that was the question from the OP and I don’t think anyone here is arguing that. To JHS example, I’d say that kid went from having a 20% chance of being accepted at Princeton to a 40% chance because of his legacy. That’s still less than even odds. Admissions aren’t that predictable. I’d never have thought that a computer nerd would be more attractive to Harvard than MIT, but he was. (Actually I did think it, but it had nothing to do with being a computer Nerd - considering Naviance info and legacy I figured my oldest had a better than 50% chance of getting into Harvard and about a 25% chance of getting into MIT.) I never ever thought he had a 100% chance although he was a top student.</p>