As far as I can see, you’re not refuting / denying my point that the legacy pool overall is likely to have higher stats / be better candidates than the non-legacy pool, because their parents value education and have the means to give them a good one (which doesn’t require great wealth). What you seem to be saying is that it’s mostly rich morons and celebrity children among the legacies who benefit from the preference. I think that’s mostly not true, actually, because I think (i) the legacy tip is sometimes how the excellent and talented applicants edge out the high-stats ORMs; and (ii) more importantly, a very strong applicant who is also the child of generous alumni is very attractive to admissions, more of those get in than ultra-rich legacy morons (there are a lot more of them to start with), and the fact that they’re legacies is an integral part of what got them in. I see this over and over.
No one denies that some dummies get in - the likelihood increases with the wealth / celebrity status of the parents (by the way, I think Meg Whitman’s sons at Princeton are far more egregious examples than Caroline Giuliani at Harvard). This is much rarer, though, than highly-qualified legacies getting in (partially due to the reasons noted above) - it’s just more visible, so engenders greater resentment.
Related to this, everyone has anecdotes about dumb Harvard grads - it comes with the territory. There are also dumb Yale and Princeton grads, amazingly enough - and people snicker at them too. By design, not all - or even most - Harvard grads are flat-out brilliant (as has been pointed out on this thread and any number of others on CC). They’re at Harvard because admissions thinks they’re going to run the world, or some small piece of it (or will otherwise be highly valuable to Harvard’s mission).
“@northwesty The athlete thing is tough because the Academic Index forces coaches to have, at a minimum, a balance of strong candidates who don’t “need” that boost proxied by the 200 points on the SAT, along with other recruited athletes who DO need that boost.”
I think the AI system makes it a lot easier to make the point. Recruited athletes on the whole get a big boost. But the Ivies go to a lot of statistical trouble to define exactly how much of a boost is allowed. On average, the team stats have to fall within two standard deviations of the campus average.
Which makes clear that the team, as a whole, will have lower than average stats. Within the team, the coach can recruit smart bench-warmers in order to make room for less smart star players. But BOTH of those kids are getting a boost. A bench-warmer who brings a 36 ACT is going to be a slam dunk admit. He’ll have a big advantage over a non-athlete with a 36 ACT at Harvard, whci maybe only gives you a 30% admit chance. At Harvard, everyone can use some boost!
@CaliDad2020 I’m going to suggest there’s a Godwin’s Law of College Confidential: as a thread on college admissions grows, the probability of someone intoducing race into it approaches 1.
25-30% at Amherst is probably considerably less than 400 people per year total (since not everyone will play a sport all four years). That’s an extremely low number for the 25 varsity teams Amherst fields, including a bunch of high head-count sports like football, men’s and women’s ice hockey, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s lacrosse, track & field.
I just did a quick count: There are 393 names of men listed on the rosters of Amherst’s 12 men’s varsity teams. Amherst’s last common data set showed an enrollment of 891 men. But for multiple-sport athletes, that would mean about 44% of the men are on a varsity team in a single year. I’m sure there are some multiple-sport athletes, but not likely a third of the team members (what would be required to drop the percentage down to 30%). And if you assume that not all athletes play all four years, that would raise the percentage up, perhaps by a considerable amount. At least among men – football requires a lot of bodies, and injures a lot of them, too – I bet 50% is closer to the truth than 25%.
My point was precisely the importance of walk-ons at Amherst, though. While Amherst doesn’t have 100+ recruited athletes per class, the admissions staff surely knows that one of their duties is to make certain they admit enough jocks in enough sports to ensure an adequate number of walk-ons to field teams. At Amherst, and at other LACs of that ilk, being a competent high school athlete is a meaningful plus, even if you are nowhere near the level of a recruitable Division I prospect. Whereas at places like Harvard, that’s not really the case; being a competent high school athlete is a nice marker for character and discipline, but they don’t need you.
From a headcount perspective, sports are surprisingly huge in the Ivy League and even huge-er in NESCAC type LACs. Here’s the numbers reported to the govt:
Football is actually one of the best and most achieve-able hooks to get into one of these schools. The level of play required really isn’t all that high, there’s lots of roster spots, and strong (but not stratospheric) academic stats will work.
@JHS Actually, looks like 31 percent is a lot closer to 25-30 percent than it is to 50 percent.
I can assure you that merely being a competent athlete isn’t any more meaningful in Amherst admission than in Harvard admissions if you aren’t being recruited to fill one of those varsity team slots.
Percent of students who are varsity athletes is very different from percent of students who have relaxed admission standards. For example, more than 30% of students at Caltech are varsity athletes, yet Caltech isn’t exactly known for being a huge sports school or relaxing admission standards for athletes.
At the schools you mentioned, it’s difficult to estimate what % of those varsity athletes may have a had a significant boost and the degree of that boost. It will likely vary tremendously by sport. For example, while at Stanford, I walked on to the rowing team with no previous experience, so it was not a factor in admission. The majority of the team had similar backgrounds. Of course, I’m sure football is a very different story.
@ThankYouforHelp@northwesty I’m not certain where northwesty’s numbers come from, but I’ll take them as correct. Still, that doesn’t account for attrition and injury. The number of people who are on a team roster in any particular year will be meaningfully lower than the number of people who will have been on a team roster in at least one year, and that number will be slightly lower than the number of people who could have been on a team but chose not to (or couldn’t) be. The NESCAC schools (and even such non-athletic schools as Swarthmore, Haverford, Pomona) need a ton of athletes. I’ll take ThankYou’s “assurance” for what it’s worth; what I have seen as an observer and heard as a consumer of experienced college counseling tells me otherwise. Amherst and Williams need to enroll 200-250 freshman athletes a year, and they aren’t all recruited in a meaningful sense.
@TomSrOfBoston You make an excellent point. The children of Ivy League and other ‘elite’ universities tend to benefit from their parent’s education. Most children I have met in this situation tell me that their parents have high expectations, are closely involved in their educations, and put a premium on involvement. Their parents also know how the system works. So it isn’t surprising that they are admitted in large numbers.
University of Pennsylvania doesn’t hide the fact that it does give alumni children some degree of preference, recommending on their website that they apply Early Decision. Nonetheless, as you note, over three-quarters are denied admission. Before we judge that legacies enjoy an ‘unfair’ advantage, it would be interesting to know the qualifications of these denied candidates. From my personal experience, most are very highly qualified and go on to be admitted to other first-tier universities.
@californiaaa Despite protests about discrimination in favor of legacies, the overwhelming percentage of admitted students do not enjoy alumni preference. I was the first person in my family to attend an Ivy League and have reading my file, I believe that counted in my favor. Again, from my experience, the preference given to candidates from under-represented states and schools is far greater than the preference given to legacies. It is no joke that is is much easier to be admitted to an elite university if your are from North Dakota than New York,
That’s true, but the other side of the same coin is that it is much, much easier to be qualified for admission to an elite university if you are from New York (City, at least, and lots of other places, too) than if you are from North Dakota (and educated there). In New York, you can get to be a viable candidate for elite university admission by being smart, working hard, and basically just living up to the standards of your family, your school, and your community. In North Dakota, with very few exceptions, you essentially have to start by being the kind of person who doesn’t pay any attention to his community’s and peer group’s expectations, and often his family’s expectations as well. There aren’t so many people like that at any intelligence level, and the ones who are like that are as likely to wind up in prison as in college.
The relationship between particular sports and wealth is an interesting factor. If Harvard established a polo team, then Harvard would suddenly need polo players.
I predicted a while ago that Harvard would eventually get around to establishing a team to play one of the games that is played at Eton, and few other places. Rackets looks like one. I have heard that there is a variant of squash played on a two-level court, which I thought they had at Eton (Eton Squares, maybe? Eton Fours?), but I can’t find it with a quick internet search. Eton may have stopped it, since it’s not evident on their games site. There is still the Wall Game.
Edited to add: More searching turned up Eton Fives, with the front half of the court about six inches higher than the back. The court also features buttresses and ledges. According to Wikepedia, most of the courts are in “public schools” in England (i.e., exclusive private schools in England). There are public courts at one location in London. As soon as this sport reaches East Coast boarding schools, I anticipate that Harvard will add it, and then they will need Eton Fives athletes.
I am old enough and deep enough into flyover country to have been able to observe the spread of soccer as a high-school team sport. One could practically rank the suburbs by socio-economic status, according to how early they adopted soccer.
Fencing hasn’t spread out here yet, as a high-school sport. The potential bump from fencing is very hard to acquire, for a student in this region.
“That’s true, but the other side of the same coin is that it is much, much easier to be qualified for admission to an elite university if you are from New York (City, at least, and lots of other places, too) than if you are from North Dakota (and educated there). In New York, you can get to be a viable candidate for elite university admission by being smart, working hard, and basically just living up to the standards of your family, your school, and your community. In North Dakota, with very few exceptions, you essentially have to start by being the kind of person who doesn’t pay any attention to his community’s and peer group’s expectations, and often his family’s expectations as well. There aren’t so many people like that at any intelligence level, and the ones who are like that are as likely to wind up in prison as in college”
I agree that standards of the community are extremely important. I live on the North Shore of Chicago and kids of upper-middle-class professionals go to college at a rate of about 99%. If they have some drastic learning disability or some mental health or drug problem, this might affect this number but I will say that with respect to learning disabilities parents here find a way to send their kid to some college whether it be a program like that at the University of Denver or even more specialized places. Even the laziest students of these parents simply assume that they will be going to college somewhere and most of the average students strive for a top 50 University. I compare this with what a colleague also upper middle class has told me about where he lives. He chose to live far out in the western suburbs…a semi rural area of the Chicagoland area. Houses are much cheaper there. But what he didn’t anticipate was that it would be common for kids there to choose not to go to college. He is shocked that his children are on a different path than he was. They don’t get the kind of “peer pressure” from the other kids in their community to work hard so they can get into the best school possible that kids in my area get.
@northwesty I agree with this point - that every single applicant to ANY Ivy school can use any and every “boost” he/she can get. Virtually nobody is guaranteed admission, regardless of applicant’s record. So even high AI athletes will appreciate the boost from being on that recruited athlete list. All I said is that the AI complicates things.
But I have to tell you - everything else the same, a 36 ACT student who is a recruited athlete is, to me, is a more competitive applicant (even without being on the coach’s list) than a 36 ACT student who is NOT at that level. Being a success in sports requires hard work - time, energy, commitment and the ability to work in a group environment. To achieve that while also achieving great success in the classroom means something and I believe that “something” is also predictive of college success as well as professional success.
We parents can discuss till the cows come home whether athletes should be given a boost in admissions at elite colleges. But at least for athletes, their accomplishments are their own (even if enabled by parental income). Until legacy favoritism is eliminated, worrying about athletes is simply distraction. For last year’s ED admissions cycle, 14% of the acceptances were athletes while 23% were legacies.
@JHS “Still, that doesn’t account for attrition and injury. The number of people who are on a team roster in any particular year will be meaningfully lower than the number of people who will have been on a team roster in at least one year… Amherst and Williams need to enroll 200-250 freshman athletes a year”
It seems like you are just making stuff up now. Attrition at schools of these caliber is almost nonexistent. And where there is an injury on a Division 3 sports team, the player remains on the team and rehabs. The team doesn’t just dump them and expand with new recruits. Amherst and Williams admissions won’t do that. This isn’t SEC football.
I don’t know where you are getting your ideas, but they seem firmly rooted.
“Before we judge that legacies enjoy an ‘unfair’ advantage, it would be interesting to know the qualifications of these denied candidates.”
People need to stop saying stuff like this. It is like talking to a climate change denier.
There’s no doubt about this. It has been studied several times. Read Hurwitz. Read Espenshade. Read Bowen. They did in fact look at the actual qualifications of actual legacy applicants. Several hundred thousand of them in fact. You could not ask for a better data set to be studied systematically. And what did they find?
They all said legacy makes a big difference to your chances of getting in. A much bigger difference than most people think.
But not as big as the difference you get for being a recruited athlete (which also has been studied multiple times too fyi).
Also, legacies are obviously going to have pretty strong stats. Since the legacy pool trends strongly to higher SES. And higher SES massively increases your chances of having high stats – by like 6X.
But even with that accounted for, legacies do much better than non-legacy kids with the same stats. Since that is exactly what the studies studied.
I don’t think preferences for legacies or athletes or AAs or dev admits are all that bad or unfair. But those preferences exist and they have been demonstrated (based on actual data and study) to be pretty big.
