Legacies - NOT an automatic admission!

JHS
Sun, 16 Mar 2008 06:38:13 +0000

danas, based on my experience and that of my friends, no, I don’t believe Yale discriminates against legacies any more than it discriminates against other well-to-do people from the Northeast, etc.: The competition is tougher and the standards are higher. Lots of those people get admitted, because on the whole they have what Yale (or Harvard, etc.) want, and they want Yale back. But when Yale takes a risk on a student, it’s not going to be a legacy. Being a legacy is probably akin to being from New Jersey: there will be lots of admissions, but you’d better look perfect.

If I were inclined to look for the falsehood, it would be in the suggestion that there is any legacy preference at all. The ephemeral notion of a legacy preference keeps the spigots open on alumni donations for decades, and that is clearly in the university’s interest. If the facts are that the university does not in fact have a preference (apart from a megadonor preference), but that it admits a high percentage of legacy applicants anyway, why wouldn’t it pretend to have a preference if that raises more money?

I have written before, and probably will again, about a friend’s conversation with a high-ranking admissions person at Harvard, who told him that Harvard only gave lip service to a legacy preference, and that they had checked the numbers and Harvard admitted Yale and Princeton legacies at the same rate it admitted its own legacies.