“The impact of legacy status on undergraduate admissions at elite colleges and universities” - a 2009 study by Michael Hurwitz of the Harvard Graduate School of Education on admissions by elite colleges.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/btl/files/michael_hurwitz_-_qp_12-12-09.pdf
Interesting methodology. Hurwitz compared admissions rates for applicants at their parents’ (or other relatives’) alma mater v. admission rates for the same applicants at other elites for which there was no legacy connection. This was intended to control for qualifications. Because the same individual’s admissions results were being compared at comparably selective universities (but for the factor of legacy), the impact of legacy could be teased out.
E.g. Johnny’s dad graduated from Harvard. He applies to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford. How does Johnny do? Is he admitted to Harvard but denied at Princeton, Yale and Stanford? This analysis was carried out for many thousands of applicants.
Hurwitz did not track alumni donations.
Hurwitz did not identify individual institutions by name.
The conclusions:
- The impact of legacy status varies wildly between different institutions from essentially no impact to a 17x greater chance of admissions. I believe I predicted this in several earlier posts in this thread.
- Legacy admits with higher SAT scores gain a greater legacy advantage.
- Primary legacies (parents are alums) gain a greater advantage than secondary legacies.
- Part of the advantage to primary legacies is conferred when they apply early.
- "In this paper, I have shown that, among the sampled colleges, the odds of admission for a legacy student are 3.13 times that of a non-legacy student. This estimated legacy admissions advantage is similar in magnitude to that obtained by Espenshade, Chung, and Walling (2004)." (p. 31)
- "Using conditional logistic regression, I find considerably less variation in the estimated legacy admissions advantage across the academic abilities spectrum than did Espenshade, Chung and Walling (2004). The narrow range of estimated legacy admissions advantages strongly contradicts the widely held notion that legacy status serves as a tip factor, only helping academically exceptional applicants on the borderline between acceptance and rejection." (p. 32)
There’s quite a bit more. The paper’s 48 pages long.