<p>Re #118, As of 2008, P’ton’s acceptance rate for legacies was 40%. </p>
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<p>Looks like things haven’t changed as much as JHS thinks. </p>
<p>[Top</a> Colleges Mum on Legacy Admissions - ABC News](<a href=“Top Colleges Mum on Legacy Admissions - ABC News”>Top Colleges Mum on Legacy Admissions - ABC News)</p>
<p>Harvard’s is similar I have been told. So most of this legacy and generally very well qualified pool is rejected, consistent with all the anecdotal reports, but is it still a “boost”.</p>
<p>College4three,</p>
<p>The data is in the references I mentioned. </p>
<p>As a further comment on the Princeton data being outdated, if you look at the references, you will see, especially in The Chosen that there has been little relative movement regarding the advantage for legacies in decades. Karabel has some interesting arguments regarding why the legacy preference came into existence and why it continues, at least at HYP. Hint: Think Jews and Asians. Lest you become too inflamed by that hint, note that Karabel relied heavily on materials, including board (or whatever you call their equivalent) notes and such from the archives for these institutions. </p>
<p>Bovertine, read The Chosen. Then remember that Spitzer is Jewish. Then remember that he applied a long time ago when things were a bit different then now.</p>
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<p>Anecdata only - 4 of my NU alum friends who had their kids apply - 3 got in. 2 were double legacy kids and the other was a single legacy kid. 1 of the 2 double legacies and the single legacy both went there. They are in the same ballpark as my kid in terms of stats, EC’s, etc. The other double legacy turned down NU for West Point. These were all regular decision, not early decision.</p>
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<p>Yeah, I’ve got The Chosen, and I know there was an effort to control the percentage of Jews at the school at that time. But 1590 is pretty high - the Harvard 90th percentile was around 1550. Maybe you needed a 1600 like Chuck Schumer to counteract the anti-semitic situation.</p>
<p>Using Judaism to explain Spitzer’s rejection by Harvard and acceptance by Princeton makes no sense at all. He is roughly my age, and when I was applying to college the percentage of Jewish men at Harvard was roughly twice what it was at Princeton. The assumption was widespread that Princeton limited the number of Jews it would accept.</p>
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<p>THe Spitzer thing seemed strange to me - apparently he was extremely smart. But that just may be the way with college admissions - then and now. They may not necessarily take the smartest person all the time.</p>
<p>I do remember from my own time with college admissions (around this same time) there were discussions about how some schools were trying to limit the percentage of Jews, and I also remember discussions about legacy, although few specifics… I’m not Jewish or a legacy so these are just vague recollections to me.</p>
<p>And on target from today’s CHE (courtesy of BigAppleDaddy from another CC thread): [10</a> Myths About Legacy Preferences in College Admissions - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/10-Myths-About-Legacy/124561/]10”>http://chronicle.com/article/10-Myths-About-Legacy/124561/)</p>
<p>The “myths” article makes a few sensible points, but:</p>
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<p>Puh-leez. This theory will get laughed out of the first court it appears in, that is, if any real lawyer would be so foolish as to raise it. I don’t think there’s any way that legacy preference will be found unconstitutional or illegal for public or private colleges, unless there is proof that it is a pretext for limiting the numbers of some other class–highly unlikely. And if legacy preference is found unlawful, legacy “consideration,” with precisely the same effects, would probably be allowed.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>Have you read the book? It is nicely documented and may help you to understand how a Spitzer like event could happen. I agree though, that his age puts him past the peak of what I would have expected.</p>
<p>At the same time, there have been a lot of subtle changes in the way admissions offices operate. An example would be Admissions Dean Hargadon’s subtle changes in recruiting geography in the 1990s that had the impact of a huge drop in the number of Jewish enrolled students. This is pretty well documented and discussed in the Daily Princetonian.</p>
<p>The “myths” article is unbelievably sloppy. There is certainly a case to be made against legacy preferences, but that piece buries it in a mudslide of selective anecdote. There’s one year when Cal Tech raised almost as much as MIT? There’s one college with a large endowment? Famous foreign universities, which generally don’t do much alumni fundraising at all, don’t use them (or say they don’t)? Including Oxford and Cambridge? Yeah, right.</p>
<p>I am confused, though, about Princeton’s apparently much-higher-than-normal legacy acceptance rate. I live and work with Princeton alums, and that’s not how they perceive the world. I know one proud Princetonian, all of whose kids were top students at an excellent private school, and all of them applied ED to other Ivy League universities, successfully, rather than applying to Princeton. They and their well-informed GCs didn’t think Princeton was a good bet. And some of them were applying before ED at Princeton ended, so they had the option to apply ED to Princeton. One hears parents b.-and-moan about this all the time.</p>
<p>JHS–so anecdotes are bad when the myth writer uses them but ok when you do? Just asking.</p>
<p>newmassdad: I skimmed through the book at the library shortly after it came out, but I can’t say that I remember details.</p>
<p>My view of Harvard’s antisemitism is colored by the fact that 50-some of my relatives, all of them Jewish, passed through it in one capacity or another between 1915, when my grandmother entered Radcliffe, and 2007, when the most recent of my cousins graduated. The family story was always that Harvard was extremely welcoming to them in a way that other snooty colleges weren’t. </p>
<p>The Spitzer thing is certainly puzzling. My family didn’t have $100 million, my SATs were a few points lower than his, and my school was less well-known than his, and Harvard was my safety school.</p>
<p>There used to be a very high level of Harvard loyalty in my family, but the fact that it now frequently rejects pretty terrific family members has weakened that considerably. I have a great-uncle who never forgave me for turning Harvard down, but who basically renounced his ties there when his only grandchild was rejected a few years ago.</p>
<p>tsdad: I’m not basing an attack or defense of the practice on anecdotes. I’m using anecdotes to raise questions about some assertions based on high-level statistics. Or, more precisely, I’m using anecdotes to illustrate a general (but anecdotal) perception among people in my social circles that legacy doesn’t mean much anymore at Princeton (or Harvard, or Yale, or etc.) I am also acknowledging that such perception could be wrong, but merely saying “the acceptance rate for legacy applicants at Princeton last year was 40%” does not prove it wrong. If my friend’s Harvard informant was right (see one of my upthread posts) that the acceptance rate for Princeton legacies at Harvard is about the same as the acceptance rate for Harvard legacies, then legacy itself means nothing at Harvard, and probably nothing at Princeton, either,</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>The whole situation with admissions at elite universities is hard to understand with regard to any one individual or small group. That’s why scholarly books like The Early Admissions Game and The Chosen are so important. They look at subpopulatitions (in the case of EAG) or actual policy documents together with institutional data (in the case of TC) to analyze what is going on collectively. </p>
<p>You are familiar with my own D’s experience. Less known is a cousin of my father who WAS accepted to Harvard as a 1st gen Jewish kid in the late 1920s, survived its most antisemitic period and went on to great success and fame as a Harvard professor. Does that prove that they did not discriminate, or that some triumped over the discrimination? I argue the latter. After all, there was not an outright ban, just non-publicized efforts to limit the number of “less desirable” students. And this has not changed, only the characteristics of the “less desirable”. For example, does the fact that Yo Yo Ma attended Harvard tell us that Harvard treats Asian students as favorably as others? Population data would argue not.</p>
<p>The only point I have to add regarding Spitzer is that maybe he really turned off his interviewer. No matter how you look on paper, if your social skills leave something to be desired…well, you see where I’m going with this. Not knowing him personally, of course, he does seem like something of an arrogant you-know-what. That kind of hubris is not always a positive.</p>
<p>college4three: That would be a great hypothesis if Harvard did interviews back then. But it didn’t, as far as I know. Of course, Spitzer’s teachers could have said he was arrogant in their recommendations . . . but from my impressions of the time that would almost have assured his admission at Harvard.</p>
<p>I’m hoping that being an NU legacy helps my S…(Pizzagirl, I may be out in the spring for a visit - will let you know).</p>
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<p>I’m not sure when Spitzer attended, but they interviewed me in 1974. A panel of three or four guys in some office building in Los Angeles.</p>
<p>I was rejected, but I don’t think it had anything to do with my interview. As you can probably tell from my posts, I’m extremely witty and engaging. ;)</p>
<p>“What you need to remember about legacies is that they are generally better qualified than other candidates, not weaker,” said Bill Shain, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin College in Maine"</p>
<p>This statement is true when we consider legacy families vs all families in America. It might not be true when we consider legacy families vs applicants’ families in a given year/elite school. It is misleading when we consider accepted legacy families vs accepted non-legacy families.</p>
<p>It seems to me that legacy policies (and what is really done with respect to legacies) may vary so widely from school to school that you have to take even these studies with a big grain of salt. If three elite colleges did one thing in 1997, that does mean much with respect to what others, or even those same colleges, are doing now.</p>