How big of a help is legacy?

JHS
Wed, 27 Dec 2017 14:23:15 +0000

At a school where one of my kids had a lot of close friends (because he went there for nine years), the year they were all seniors, 11 kids applied to Yale SCEA out of a class of 98. Seven of them were legacies – not sibling legacies (which is relatively weak), but one or both parents had at least one degree from Yale (mostly Yale College, but also MD, PhD, and JD). Anyway, only one kid was accepted early, and she was one of the four non-legacies. Also not an athlete, not a URM (in fact, Asian), and not one of the top two or three kids in the class based on grades. Some of the legacy kids who weren’t accepted at Yale were accepted RD by Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia; they were hardly weak candidates.

The point is: Apply on your own merits. You probably won’t get accepted, but the legacy kids you know also probably won’t get accepted, either. If you have a good case to make for yourself, you just may be successful.