I’ve seen that study attributed to Yale not Harvard.
This is what Harvard generally says about legacy admissions:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/11/admissions-fitzsimmons-legacy-legacies/
If the university is doing its job, it’s going to be well aware when a legacy and/or large donor’s child is applying. The university knows from the Common App if an applicant’s a legacy and, at minimum, as a courtesy in view of the existing relationship with the school, after a legacy’s application is received schools often send a form letter to the alumnus acknowledging this. The letter serves the dual purpose of making the alumnus feel that the school is paying special attention while giving the school an opportunity to manage expectations by noting clearly in the letter that the majority of legacies are denied.
As @oldfort says, if someone is highly involved at the school (whether or not monetarily), has a history of making large donations, or further donations may be under discussion or forthcoming, it behooves the school to be on notice well in advance if someone close to that person is considering applying. Usually there will be a relationship manager assigned to any substantial donor by the development office, whose business it is to help solicit donations and direct them to purposes worked out in consultation with the donor, as well as to be up to speed on any forthcoming applications and assure the donor that the university is focused (while making no promises).
Think about it: the school wants the donor (who is rightly important to them) to feel like they’re paying attention, and to be able to manage expectations early on if the kid seems marginal or unqualified. What they don’t want is for a denial to come as a bolt from the blue. The donor’s probably going to be unhappy no matter what if there’s a denial, but if they feel like their child got a good look, there’s at least a chance that they won’t stalk off in a huff, badmouthing the school, and never come back.
First, when colleges or many conversations on CC discuss legacies, there’s a tendency to regard them as one monolithic group rather than a differentiation between legacy applicants who are scions of wealthy who donate substantial sums/well-noted alums whose accomplishments bring good credit to the college and the ones whose parents donate only a few hundred a year or less because they are ordinary upper-middle class without the financial wherewithal or for those with it, aren’t willing to do so for their child.
If it’s the latter type of legacy and they were admitted, there’s a very high likelihood they were treated by adcoms little differently from their unhooked counterparts unless they had another hook in play.
The above was well-known among GCs at least 2 decades ago.
It was also confirmed by a relative and an older friend who both worked in Ivy/elite college admissions office. Former was an adcom in her own right and the older friend did his work-study at his elite college while an undergrad.
Both have mentioned that legacy/developmental applicants whose families have donated large sums or viewed as having a high probability of doing so or are scions of famous/notable alums or non-alum parents with substantial accomplishments(i.e. novelist, nobel prize winner, President) have their application folders flagged with special coded markers for special consideration.
An applicant with none of those factors…including legacies who donate a few hundred or less won’t have their application folders flagged in that manner.
I think we should stay on somewhat current practices. Past history can cloud an already confusing point.
As some have said, the conversations with mega donors about Junior start early. The family is already at a high donor level. (And Dev folks have family bio info, plus an awful lot more.) If Jr is interested but not a strong candidate, there’s plenty of time to nicely suggest he’d be a better match elsewhere. As DB notes, there’s already a relationship, carefully cultivated.
This isn’t left to Dev. They would have that whadyathink convo with admissions, some info about Jr’s school performance in hand. First, to ask, later to confirm Jr is applying. No advance promises.
As for plain old legacies, if the only flag that the kid is a legacy comes on the app itself, it gets coded for type. (All legacies do, ime, regardless of donation level or how much work for the alum groups.) A number of admissions deans have said they make sure a parent legacy gets “at least a second look.” All that really means is someone besides the regional AO will give thoughts. If that legacy candidate is good, meets expectations, fine, he/she makes it past first cut. Then the rest of the team has at it, continues to review and rate, and ultimately, if warranted, the final committee.
I also think our notions about how wealth offers a privileged education misses that not all legacies or mega donor kids are themselves super duper. Same issue with URMs and low SES: people tend to think they’re all at a substantial disadvantage, missing how many bright and able kids strive, accomplish, and have great mentoring.
@roethlisburger : Re the (perhaps mythical) Harvard study. A friend (whom I trust) was told about this by someone relatively senior in the Harvard admissions office about 8 years ago. On occasion, other CC participants, including some who have participated in Harvard admissions, have also referred to it.
As to why Harvard would look at Yale and Princeton legacies (vs. “all legacies,” whatever that means): It’s pretty likely that Yale and Princeton alumni are indistinguishable, demographically, from Harvard alumni. And more than mere demographic similarity, they are also overwhelmingly likely to have attitudes toward education, liberal arts education, and higher education in the same general range. So looking at Harvard’s acceptance of Yale and Princeton legacies is an awfully good natural experiment to judge how much your special procedures for legacy applicants produce different results than you get through the regular process with kids from nearly identical backgrounds.
They wouldn’t publicize the results because the results undercut the idea that legacies (with involved parents) get a leg up, which would hurt alumni contributions and time commitments. Here on CC, everyone regards legacy preferences as shameful, but in the real world practically every college wants its alumni to believe in them, and doesn’t particularly care what non-alumni think. What’s more, there’s no evidence whatsoever that non-alumni are bothered by it enough to change their behavior.
It’s always important to remember that averages mean nothing about an individual. A particular child of a super-wealthy donor may be second-rate or an absolutely impeccable candidate. However, I think @lookingforward got a little sloppy with language in the second sentence quoted above. Low SES children almost always are at a substantial disadvantage. They may be bright and able, and strive, and accomplish, and have great mentoring, but that helps them overcome the disadvantage, not show that it doesn’t exist.
Years ago, I wrote a post comparing my child to a friend with nearly identical stats. The difference was that my kid was indistinguishable from maybe 30 or 40 other kids in the same cohort in our region with similar backgrounds (high SES families with parents with elite educations and, generally, graduate degrees, and a cultural tradition of valuing education), and all of them were more or less just fulfilling their families’ expectations for kids with a certain level of natural ability. By contrast, the friend was going to be the first person in his family, including three older siblings, to go to college at all, and was without doubt the #1 candidate from his ethnic group in that year’s cohort in the region. He had been forging his own path with no road map or family role models since middle school. His academic achievements were unique; my kid’s identical achievements weren’t.
Interesting. The original disadvantage exists, yes. But the general assumption is disadvantaged kids cannot overcome or even surpass what the more secure, with better ed opportunities do. I see it differently. Granted, I see a piece, the brightest, most motivated, and those able to process mentoring advice. And we’ve been talking tippy tops, with their level of support, academic and usually financial.
Often, the reasons they impress have a little less to do with the challenge parts and more about the actual activation and impact, a level of maturity and purpose. Plus the ability to self-advocate, when needed. This goes well beyond stats and pay to play learning opps. It’s not just comparing stats.
Plenty of high-SES kids whose parents have had elite educations don’t live up to the advantages they were born with. And some low-SES kids against the odds make it to @lookingforward -land based on their maturity and purpose, etc. The fact is, though, a smart kid with maturity and purpose from the barrio is likely to find that that takes him/her to school to become a pharmacist or CPA - maybe, if they’ve done really well, to the state university to become a lawyer or doctor. It takes a combination of terrific personal qualities, mentoring/supportive parents and a very large helping of luck for these kids even to consider Ivies within reach and apply to them. By contrast, for the wealthier kids it’s entirely natural, even expected, for them to aim high. So, as usual, I find myself nodding in agreement with @JHS.
If alumni knew that their donations were not helping kids who needed it would they still give?
If I’m understanding your post correctly, @ClarinetDad16 , you’re asking if alumni would still give if they thought it wouldn’t help get children in who might not be admitted otherwise. No one knows for sure. Some undoubtedly would still give even if there weren’t a kid they were hoping it might make a difference for; I’m confident many would not still give, or at least not in the same amounts, if it were clear that it would have no effect at all. As I said a few pages ago:
It seems to me that this thread is going in circles now.
Not at all. I think you misunderstood.
Think about how people give charitably to feed the homeless, rebuild homes after a natural disaster, to help underprivileged kids play music, etc.
And in that same vein, for example:
Do Harvard alumni want to donate to help change lives for first generation students to have the resources to succeed on campus?
@ClarinetDad16 - I’m sure plenty would donate for that if possible, but most donations aren’t large enough for the university to be willing/able to segregate them for a specific purpose (apart from the schools and initiatives set out here: http://alumni.harvard.edu/give). Most donations are unrestricted, i.e., may be spent as the university sees fit. Their use will include, to some extent, support of your purpose, but will also include, indirectly, every other type of operating expense, including things like faculty and staff salaries and facilities costs, as well as financial aid. Larger donors may work with the development staff to earmark their donations more specifically.
My rather small school has different funds you can donate to. Capital, scholarships etc.
I’m a low donor alum who is pretty involved. There are peopel in the alumni and admissions office who know me, because I attend the local alumni events, have hosted new student events in my home, etc.
So as someone said above not all involved/known alumni are high donor alumni.
I never gave Harvard money with any expectation that it would help my kids. I give because I value my Harvard experience and would like to do my bit to help others have a great experience too. I did make my oldest apply because I thought he’d be better off their than at either of his safeties, but it was never his first choice. When he got in he went to accepted students weekend and liked it much better than he expected to. He agonized about where to go until April 30. My youngest applied mostly to prove to his Dad he wouldn’t get it. I still give to Harvard though both my kids have graduated from the colleges they did choose.
I should have said Harvard legacies vs all other applicants. Since Harvard is more than capable of running a regression on student level variables(SATs, ECs, GPA, class rank, demographics), it still seems strange to add parental views to education as a control variable(which you’re using HYP legacy status as a proxy for). I still think there’s some conflation of less affluent legacies(whose $1000/year donation is less than a rounding error in Harvard’s endowment) and development admits, who may or may not also be legacies, with the potential to give large amounts of money.
If legacies get a boost, it doesn’t bother me. We are lucky to live in the USA where there are lots of excellent colleges. So, my kid doesn’t get into an Ivy or other high level school because legacies take spaces. No big deal. They are private institutions. They can do what they please. There are other institutions that actually want my kids and where they will get a good education. In fact, sometimes the smaller schools provide a much better education. Most of the admissions game is a crap shoot anyway, as anyone who works in admissions will tell you.
To gauge the boost that comes with legacy status, you’d really need to look at the actual individual application files so you could control for factors like test scores and grades. And then you’d also want to look at how a particular legacy fares at the legacy school versus other similarly selective non-legacy schools. That’s the only way to get past the anecdotal evidence (“I know a Harvard legacy that was rejected but got into Princeton…”).
Hurwitz is the guy that actually did that, gaining access to tens of thousands of actual app files and thousands of actual admissions decisions across a bunch of very selective schools. His conclusion – after you control for other things, legacy is a big help.
But you have to interpet “big” in context. At ultra low admit rate schools like Harvard, tripling or quadrupling your chances is still not a slam dunk to get in. But that amount of boost is statistically huge and much bigger than what’s implied by the “feather on the scale metaphor.”
The better analogy is that legacy is more often a tie breaker, which doesn’t sound like much. But if you are playing a game where there are tons and tons and tons of ties (which is how selective admissions work), having a magic tie-breaker (like a coin with two heads on it for a coin toss) is big.
Dev admits are not the same thing as garden variety legacies of course.
Hurwitz looked at 2007 apps and as far as I know, didn’t name the colleges. Though he found legacies got some boost, he also notes slightly higher scores. What he misses is that different top schools can look for slightly different mixes of attributes. And I don’t know if he accounted for the qualitative interpretations, how the actual reading of the apps and supps works- or not.
Hurwitz had to agree to confidentiality to get access to the files. But it is obvious that the applications came from the COFHE group. Since they all pool admissions and finance data. Hurwitz got data from 30 selective schools at the time of his study; today this group has 35 schools. QED.
As far as I know, Hurwitz is the only professional study which looked at actual app files and tracked admissions outcomes of applicants across a number of selective legacy and non-legacy schools. “He looked at data from 133,236 applicants for 2007 college admission, and analyzed the outcomes of the 61,962 who applied to more than one of the elite colleges. That allowed him to compare how much more likely they were to be offered admission where they had family connections.”
Since I didn’t do a study and I didn’t have access to many tens of thousands of applicants’ confidential info, I’ll just go with his conclusions. But maybe you have better insight, methods or data access than Hurwitz did?
I’m comfortable with legacies being both a tie breaker and a rather large boost. Everything I’ve read is that the single digit admissions schools could admit multiples of what they currently admit and still have a great class. I suspect that they could admit even more legacies than they currently do with no effect on their stats and with the same mix of interesting ECs and accomplishments. Did this get posted in this thread?
from http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/
You would expect that legacies would have pretty strong SAT scores overall. It can be true that legacies have a big boost for admission while also being true that they have average or better test scores as a group.
As a group they’d trend higher SES than average, and we all know that SAT scores correlate with higher SES. Also, the legacy group wouldn’t include (by definition) any 1st gen students and also is going to be light on URMs.
The boost that the legacies get isn’t that they get in with the same lower SAT scores that URMs, 1st gens or athletes get in with. Instead, it is that they get in MUCH more often with the same or slightly lower SAT scores as compared to similar unhooked kids. That’s what Hurwitz analyzed and controlled for.
When it comes to selecting among large numbers of comparable upper SES suburban kids with strong stats, the legacies get picked 3-5X more often than the comparable non-legacy kids. If the game usually ends in a tie, having an advantage at the tie-breaker stage means a lot.