Note that Michigan does consider relation with alumnus as a factor in frosh admissions.
A 13.7% increase is on top of the base admission rate, but isn’t a POINT increase, right? So (rounding it to 14% just to make my math easier), it bumps a 10% admission rate to 11.4% – it doesn’t take the 10% up 14 POINTS to 24%. Is that how the study is looking at it?
No, it is actually percentage points, like moving from 10% to 24%.
Thanks for clarifying.
Which is why I said in my post earlier in the thread that the typical 40 to 50 percent advantage given to primary legacies is “YUGE”.
By the way, how many percentage points would you consider to be a "feather on the scale’? How many would be a “lead brick on the scale”?
How do you reconcile that, then, with the fact that there is no top 20 school which has ever indicated a legacy acceptance rate of 50% or more? If there are allegedly 40 - 50 percentage points being added on? Even the highest I’ve seen (Princeton) was somewhere in the neighborhood of 35% - 40%.
Thought experiment (hat tip to Hunt for the expression).
Suppose on average, legacies are equal stats to similar-socioeconomic non-legacies; that is, they are equally qualified.
Suppose as well, legacies are more likely to be applying to (or showing strong interest in) the undersubscribed departments that colleges want to fill – Greek language and literature, art history, etc. - and less likely to be applying to the “popular” departments (STEM, economics, political science). Would it be acceptable if legacies had a higher acceptance rate in that case?
I haven’t been able to find a free access to the complete study. But I was going to ask about intended major as well. I feel this is a much-overlooked flaw in the Espenshade study.
I think both intended-major and geographic-presence are major overlooked factors in all of these types of studies. If a certain group of any sort “overskews” to certain intended majors, and / or “overskews” to certain areas of the country, their results are going to be naturally depressed, and that’s not evidence of any malfeasance or prejudice or bias.
“How do you reconcile that, then, with the fact that there is no top 20 school which has ever indicated a legacy acceptance rate of 50% or more? If there are allegedly 40 - 50 percentage points being added on? Even the highest I’ve seen (Princeton) was somewhere in the neighborhood of 35% - 40%.”
Hurwitz’s tables are aggregated data for all the schools for one. That’s an average. He noted that the boost varied by selectivity – lower selective schools gave more boost. He had to maintain confidentiality as a condition of getting the data.
For another, his data is a few years old. So you’d expect the lowering of the overall admit rates in the past few years to correlate to a lower amount of boost.
Third, he’s talking about the boost given to a particular kid on average with particular stats and controlling for other variables. At Brown these days, a perfect 36 ACT only gets you a 24% chance of admission. Assume a legacy kid with same is a 75% chance. That’s a YUGE 50 points of boost.
But anectdotally, many would assume/say that kid got in because he had a perfect score rather than because of legacy status. But that would be incorrect.
It still doesn’t ring true with the fact that elite schools are still turning down the vast majority of their legacy applicants. I"m certainly willing to believe a boost. But I can’t ignore the fact that it’s not as though legacies really have a 60% or greater chance of getting in.
Did the study also also control for application type (EA, ED, RD), since the policies and admission rates may be different?
Come on Pizza. Hurwitz is a Harvard PHD. He studied tens of thousands of actual applications. I don’t think he’s making this up or doing it wrong.
It strikes me as entirely plausible that a 36 ACT legacy kid at Brown is basically a slam dunk. Which would easily be 50 points better. The “average” 36 ACT-er is just 24%; non-legacy 36 ACT-er would be even lower.
Not HYS, but Colgate publishes the admit rates for legacies each year on its website. For the Class of 2020, 206 children/grandchildren applied, 111 were admitted.
My alma mater, Williams, doesn’t publish legacy admit rates, but it does something that probably helps keep the legacy admit rate pretty high - the admissions office offers legacy informational interviews, in which the applicant’s admissions chances are discussed pretty frankly before the application is ever submitted.
I’m not seeing how these high percentages are possible either. If you look at Princeton’s admissions data broken down by SAT scores, and consider that legacy Harvard freshmen have an average SAT score of almost 2300, you can guesstimate an acceptance rate of about 13%. The legacy acceptance rate at Harvard is actually about 30%, so if legacy boost is the sole explanation for the difference between these two numbers, that puts the boost at 17%, a little over double, which, in my opinion, is pretty large, but nothing like the 50% number being tossed around here.
My guess is that the 2300 legacy has more than a 30% shot. Since 30% is the average legacy admit rate, Mr. 2300 is probably more like 40 or 50%. But let’s assume Mr. 2300 is only boosted up to 30%.
Do you think increasing your admissions chance by 2.3X (13% to 30%) is just a feather on the scale? Or, as the OP put it, “legacy per se probably counts for almost nothing.”
I look at it differently. Your chances of rejection go from 87% to 70%. Whoop-de-doo. If you have any brains whatsoever, you’d still better prepare to be rejected, and be pleasantly surprised if you’re not.
No, I don’t think a potential 17% chance is a “feather”. I said it was “pretty large”, if you read my post.
But 2300 is about the average score for legacies, so why you are suggesting Mr. 2300 has a 40-50% chance to get admitted, when the overall is 30%?
“But 2300 is about the average score for legacies, so why you are suggesting Mr. 2300 has a 40-50% chance to get admitted, when the overall is 30%?”
Is the 2300 the average for all legacies, or just admitted legacies? I’d check it myself, but I think the link is a few pages back.
To some of you: it’s not all about testing stats or gpa. You have to account for the rest of what matters to adcoms. If you do look at the Princeton and Brown breakouts by stats, it should be crystal clear something more is going on than jumping up and down over a 2300, then tipping in some just because they are legacies.
Don’t assume just for being high stats, a kid knows the school or chose to apply on any basis other than rep. The tippy tops want to see that sort of broader/deeper awareness, an informed choice. Don’t you think the legacy kids’ parents’ experiences lend something to those kids’ perspectives?