Interview on Yale Admissions Process with Former AO Post Scandal

MWolf
Fri, 04 Oct 2019 21:39:41 +0000

To actually test whether legacy status has an impact, it is not enough to provide a bunch of anecdotes of legacies who were rejected.

Besides, the acceptance rate to Yale is so low that even if being a legacy increased one’s chances of being accepted threefold, that still would only be about 18% acceptance rate for legacies, meaning that more than 80% of all legacies who applied would be rejected.

While Yale claims that only 11% of their students are legacies, as can be seen with Harvard, a college can simply change their definition of “legacy” to manipulate the results. So, While Harvard claims to have only 14% legacies, according to their own paper, almost 37% of their class of 2022 had a relative who had attended Harvard, and 14.5% only referred to having at least one parent who attended Harvard. I would not be at all surprised in Yale had similar ways to redefine what they mean by “legacy”.

Legacy makes good business sense for a private colleges which depends on alumni donations, and therefore will not be eliminated. They may just find other ways to mask it.