Legacies - NOT an automatic admission!

Hunt
Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:04:31 +0000

“Since only a fraction of all the legacies apply, their admit rate is of course quite a bit higher.” I’d bet it’s a pretty big fraction.
I also think there is some confusion here between a legacy admit and a development admit. The development admit is the person with his family name on the new stadium–it’s well known that top schools will compromise on their normal admissions requirements to admit such people, in order to get the money. The question we’re discussing here is whether the schools have to compromise on their normal admissions requirements in order to admit a larger percentage of legacy admissions than from the overall pool. Here’s my prediction: if you were to compare the stats of the average legacy applicant to the stats of the average applicant, the stats of the legacy would be higher. However, if you compared the stats of the average legacy applicant to the average applicant excluding recruited athletes, URMs, and development admits, the average stats would be somewhat, but not a lot, lower.