Actually, the Harvard data is that the legacy admits have somewhat higher extra-curricular achievement, academic and testing scores than the regular applicant pool admits. They don’t publish on the handful of real (>20M) dean’s interest list people. I guess they demand discretion.
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Then why would Harvard need to give legacies any admission preference at all?
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Because they have to choose amongst equally qualified candidates. They have plenty of wealthy bright students apply and give the legacy kids an edge. No big deal. If they didn’t, that spot would likely go to a kid who’s dad went to Princeton or Yale or somehow equality well off. It’s not like they are choosing legacy over a kid from rural TX.
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They don’t need to. They choose to. And when one of us is elected President of Harvard or Princeton, we can change that if we like.
If you’re really that incredulous, just google the Harvard data. It’s all in the public domain especially after the SFA case.
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To keep the alumni donations rolling in?
The last time that Harvard didn’t have the option of “I prefer not to say” on the questionnaire about family income, 46.4% of all legacies came from families which make more than $500,000, and another 22.8% came from families which made between $250,000 and $500,000.
I think that answers the question of “what do legacies bring?”
No, actually they don’t - there is nothing there that cannot be explained by wealth. Wealth has a huge impact on extra-curricular “achievement”. The super wealthy legacies aren’t the ones winning the math olympiads or any of the other academic competitions. They do, however, have the ability to play country-club sports, and be better at them than kids who are middle income. The wealthy also generally attend private high schools for the wealthy, and get better LoRs, and have their counselors rate them higher than mid income kids attending a public high school. They have parents who can set them up with internships at top companies, and they have people at their high school who will make sure to set them up with internships at companies and labs. Money makes everything easier, including ECs.
Of course, the really wealthy ones have highly paid “college consultants” curating their activities, and making certain that the ECs look really good without raising red flags for the AOs. The same inflated AC, after being advised and then being described on an applications by a $500,000 “consultant” may actually look impressive to an AO.
That demonstrates just how wealth can help create the illusion of accomplishments. There are a number of “college counselors” who guarantee that they will make sure that your kid will be accepted to one of their top three choices, for the paltry sum of between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Unless these conselors are also magicians and somehow bestow extra talents and intelligence on student whose parents can pay that much, it is very clear that money can buy all sorts of non academic and academic achievements that are valued by AO’s at Ivies and other “elite” colleges.
Again, the Ivies not looking to Teach the Brightest and Best. They are looking to have the alumni who will bring positive attention, money, and influence to their Alma Mater.
Any business will tell you that return customers are the best bet. @TonyGrace is right - if they didn’t take a super wealthy legacy, they would take a super wealthy non-legacy. After all, there are many applicants who have the best application profile that money can buy, but the legacies and their parents are more likely to donate to the college.
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No. Actually, you demonstrably have it backward. For the majority of students, especially those with ivy-level objective credentials, wealth is a liability. Look at this chart from the NYT.
For students whose families’ income is between the 70th and 98.5th percentile, the likelihood of admission to a top university is LESS than for those in the 1-60th percentage. Only for families above the 99.5-99.9% for income is there a greater chance of admission.
People who make classist arguments slide ambiguously between the upper middle class, upper class and the globally wealthy. It’s really not the same thing, and only the last category really brings attention, money (of any lasting signficance) or influence to their alma mater. Or does the influence go the other way… (?Ackman).
Other hallmarks of classist arguments are to reject all of the accomplishments of a student from a wealthy student as “illusory”. Now is that really fair? I think we can all agree that access to greater resources can open doors and help, but is Bronny James less of a basketball player because of his dad’s money? Maybe it has something to do with his genes and a good amount of hard work. You tell Bronny that “there is nothing that cannot be explained by your wealth” and see what he says. Classists don’t like this Bronny kind of example because it blows up their “all rich people are private school, country club snobs” archetype with all of its concomitant racial and societal undertones.
And if it were true that wealth could explain all, for all of the reasons you cite, wouldn’t one expect all the IMO and IPHO winners to be rich? Have you actually spoken to any IMO or IPHO gold medalists? I spoke to a few at Harvard and Yale. If you had, you’d realize that those competitions are about training, from a young age. Think about the spelling bee but for number and set theory. Most of the winners liken it to a sport. And just like sport, coaches matter, and talent matters, and training really matters. You argue that the wealthy can afford the best coaches and are the most sophisticated in helping their children to their illusory accomplishments. So the rich don’t win the IMO because they lack talent? We are to believe that all those finance guys in quant hedge funds have no genetic pool of math talent?
Colleges decide how much of their class they want to pay full tuition. Every ivy is different, and every ivy is different year-to-year. It’s their own budgeting decision. Even with a $50 billion endowment, they have budgets. Those paying full raft help float programs like not charging any tuition at all to families who make < $100k per year. If Princeton (this is a Princeton thread after all) wants to let its upper middle class alumni be the ones to pay full admission and not some other doctor or lawyer or banker, it’s really hard to see that as some huge project for social warriors.
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Since we seem to have exhausted talking about the OP, I’m setting this thread to auto close this evening.
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I did say that the perceptions were “often false.” In some cases, … .
To respond a little too earnestly to satire, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is designed to help you adjust the perceptions to match reality. Usually that would be discovering that some girls actually want to go out with you (in the examples I used) but you need to learn basic social skills to initiate normal conversations rather than stalking them. In your case, the adjusting the perception might be to recognize the very low probability of realizing those expectations and adjusting them.
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LOL, don’t worry, like every woman on this planet I long ago understood I needed to adjust my expectations.
You must not blame us for rolling our eyes a bit at men like Seligman and his belief that what works for scoring a hot new spouse 17 years your junior is “social skills.”
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