Does legacy really matter?

[monydad]

<p>I imagine admissions rates are close to half of what they were in 1997 at a decent number of selective colleges.</p>

[mathmom]

<p>JHS, I was going to say I’m pretty sure I had a Harvard interview, but then I remembered I applied to Radcliffe. Last class to do so and the first to have a Harvard diploma I believe. :)</p>

[JHS]

<p>I’m positive I DIDN’T interview for Harvard in 1974. I did for everywhere else.</p>

<p>I couldn’t find Harvard’s application numbers for 1997, but the news stories last year said applications had doubled since 1994. I believe the number of acceptances has gone down slightly over that period – I know Harvard accepted more people in the 70s than it does today (because its yield has gone up since then), but I don’t know when the big moves occurred. So, yes, admission rates are close to half of what they were in 1997.</p>

<p>I don’t think any of us knows what the difference in legacy applications is. But everyone expanded their classes in the early-mid 70s with coeducation, and I’m pretty sure that not many children of alumni from those larger classes had applied by 1997. Yale’s first 1,300-student class was 1974 or 1975. I’m sure that some of those people had kids born in 1979 or before, but not many. The big bump in legacy applications probably started around applications to the college classes of 2004 forward.</p>

<p>I guess it’s worth noting that legacy applications could not possibly have increased as much as applications in general (i.e., roughly doubled). There may have been 25-33% more elite college alumni starting in the mid-70s, but their birth rate wasn’t increasing much if at all.</p>

<p>So legacy applications represent a smaller percentage of applications today than in 1997. If legacy applicants represent the same percentage of accepted students, that would mean that the apparent legacy advantage would have increased.</p>

[bovertine]

<p>

I’m positive I DIDN’T interview for Harvard in 1974.

</p>

<p>Maybe because it was a sure thing for you. </p>

<p>Because I assure you, I had an interview - I’m not imagining it, or making it up. I also remember explicitly that I got a letter that said “Possible” admission. Maybe they only interviewed the vast unwashed in the middle and didn’t bother interviewing people that were considered “Likely” admits.</p>

[brunette]

<p>My oldest daughter was a HS senior a few years ago. She was accepted to Columbia (H’s alma mater) and waitlisted from Yale (my alta mater).</p>

[Pizzagirl]

<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>There’s a poster on here (though not on this particular thread) who has a family background with extensive Harvard connections; my guess would be that they are the same scale as hers, except hers falls under old WASP money. She went to Princeton and both of her kids wound up at Princeton (one is a recent grad, the other still there).</p>

<p>I would also say that if your group of Princeton alum friends all have “well-informed GC’s,” then by definition they are most likely on the extremely affluent side of things. (NTTAWWT, of course.)</p>

[Pizzagirl]

<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>I’m sure the JHS-clan members are uniformly brilliant, of course, but to truly have 50+ relatives pass through Harvard’s doors … especially being Jewish, and especially beginning in 1915 when society was quite different … tells me that while the JHS-clan may not have $100 million, at least one of the patriarchs had some pretty serious social connections going on. NTTAWWT. It also tells me that your “social circles” are pretty darn different from most of ours.</p>