@Twoin18 . . . sorry for my lack of alacrity in response to your post.
But do you think that Dr. Ferguson would be the right person to ask concerning the intelligence of Harvard students vis-à-vis those of Oxford’s? In your link, he’s was just regurgitating the anti-criteria of his alma mater related to his experience in teaching at Harvard.
Honestly, how can athlete admissions be important at H, with no scholarships? You have Ryan Fitzpatrick who scored one of the highest Wonderlic’s ever of all NFL prospects – not necessarily saying much in relation to the League, I realize. Jeremy Lin? He was only a 5.0 scholar (on a 4.0 scale) at Palo Alto HS and a 1,500+ SAT. Yeah, he wanted to go to UCLA, but they didn’t offer him an athletic scholarship, so it was Stanford as a walkon until Harvard accepted him. Edit: Full pay, if I am not mistaken.
Affirmative Action does have some play, but it’s at a higher plane at H than any other college in the US; and given that these students typically come from lower income and because of this worse high schools, then who’s to say they aren’t as highly qualified as those from great suburban high schools?
Wrt to legacies? Meh . . . smart people beget smart people. And if they donate to the capital fund, then good for H.