I read on an article that being a legacy can be compared to improving your SAT score by 160 points to some colleges like University of Michigan. I’m a double legacy, so will this greatly improve my chances of getting in?
Depends on the college. Some colleges do not consider legacy at all (check the college’s common data set, section C7). If a college does consider legacy, it is unlikely to give any more information than that, since it wants legacies to believe that the effect is large, but it wants non-legacies to believe that the effect is small.
Make your reach/match/safety assessment of the school without considering any possible effect of legacy.
Again, it depends on the college. At most, it might boost your application a little if you are on the borderline, but it certainly won’t make up for any deficiencies in your application. It certainly doesn’t guarantee anything or the equivalent of improving your score by 160. Legacy won’t help out a great deal unless your parents donate a ton of money.
Agreed it depends on the school. It also depends on how involved parents were with the school (money given or serving as a trustee, etc.) At many schools, it helps only in the ED round.
Generally, it is helpful in nudging your application over the line if you are a very qualified applicant and not so helpful if you are not.
Yes, the legacy policy varies from school to school but I don’t think legacy status would be worth 160 SAT points anywhere (unless your parents donated a building or something). Per the UM website “Although not a primary factor in admissions decisions, having a parent, step-parent, grandparent, or sibling who attended the University of Michigan is considered as part of the holistic review process.”
https://admissions.umich.edu/assets/docs/FAQs-EA.pdf
Note that 160 point is a pure estimation based on the old SAT scale (2400). It is likely from an old study before the significant drop in admission rate of UMich in recent years. I do know someone with AcT 29 got admitted into CoE from in state with legacy though. Note that all these are already reflected in the admission stat. So even with legacy and from in state, your stat still cannot be much lower the 25th percentile. Now that the gap between 25th percentile and median for admission is only around 60-70 points in SAT and 2 points in ACT.
We might have different definitions of old and recent for this context but remember the “old” SAT only came out for the high school class of 2006 so it only existed for 10 years
Hurwitz