Legacy not counting as much?

dfree124
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:14:33 +0000

Copy and pasted from another thread, credit goes to 45 Percenter:

My understanding as a long-time alum who’s attended a lot of admissions and alumni sessions, and read what Penn has had to say about legacy admissions over the years:


Single vs. double legacy is irrelevant. Once you’re a legacy (have at least one parent or grandparent who is a graduate of any school at Penn), it doesn’t matter how many additional alumni parents or grandparents you may have.
These days, at least 2/3 of legacy applicants–and perhaps even more at this point, since Penn has stopped publishing these statisitics–are rejected. Legacy status gives a slight advantage during the early decision round, all other factors (grades, SATs, ECs, recommendations, essays, etc.) being equal, but it will not make up for any “deficiencies” in an application, and is essentially not an advantage at all during the regular decision round.
Whether or not the parent/grandparent alum has donated to Penn is not a factor in the legacy “bump.” If a parent or grandparent has given a significant amount to Penn (6 or 7 figures), that might be taken into account in the admissions process, but that would make the applicant a “developmental” admit as they say in the admissions biz, which is not the same as a legacy admit.


When Penn used to release statistics for legacy admissions, the acceptance rate for legacies was maybe 5 or 10 points higher than the overall acceptance rate for non-legacy appicants during the ED round (e.g., 30-35% for legacies applicants vs. an overall ED acceptance rate of 25%), and the RD acceptance rate for legacy applicants was not higher than the overall RD acceptance rate.