Well, that’s what gets some people’s goats. Because it’s “not fair” that Hunt, for example, could tell his children a lot more about Yale, what they value, what they look for, etc. than I ever could. (It’s also “not fair” that some people are born with musical or mathematical or athletic abilities. It’s “not fair” that some parents can afford private schools and others can’t. A lot of things in life aren’t fair.)
I’m starting to think that what’s getting people’s goats here is that they like to think their kid got into their alma mater based on the kid’s stats and achievements, and don’t want to admit there was a brick tossed onto the scale during admissions.
No brick. The kid is asked to complete and app and supps. Many assume it’s just a formality. Whose fault is that?
Sorry-- pet peeve… Object of preposition:
Between my wife and me
Congrats to daughter. UCLA is a great school!
@VeryLuckyParent I for one am not questioning your motive, agenda or the significance of what you are interested in exploring and discussing. It’s legit to discuss college admission related topics on CC, period. And you are entitled to your opinions. I just don’t think it’s feasible to get the colleges to disclose all the aggregated data and stats you want to see. And it’s not illegal to not disclose them.
Legacy receives preferential treatment. There’s no question about it because the colleges openly acknowledge it. legacy boost is not ignorable but the boost as the research mentioned in this thread indicates is inversely related to selectivity - in the ultra selective, the boost is less or at least feels less, just as in OP’s case. And I agree some of the posters on this thread who might’ve benefited from their legacy status (nothing wrong with it btw) are being dishonest arguing left and right to say that legacy boost is ignorable.
As has been said, the boost is more than the schools want the general population to know, but less than they’d like the alumni to think. No one is doubting that there isn’t SOME boost. What is being disputed is that it is huge orders of magnitude (esp when corrected for SES or similar-scoring non-legacies) AND that it “raises the dead.”
I for one know that we dissuaded our kid from applying to legacy school, and it wasn’t until he came back and said “it truly is my first love” that it got put back on the table. I can sleep at night easily that I didn’t twist his arm, and I can sleep easy at night given that he took leadership position in several campus organizations and graduated with honors. So no, no goats gotten here.
I challenge the assertion that a 36 scoring legacy at Brown is a slam dunk. Not true based on my observations, not true based on the experiences of my classmates, most of whom have kids who are either graduated from college or now in college/applying to college, and not true based on the “who gets in” profiles the alumni interviewers are sent every season after admissions is completed.
A 36 legacy with “something else”- kid is extraordinary in some artistic, literary, musical way- yes, a slam dunk. As I stated before, child of a US Senator, famous actor/director- yes, that 36 is a slam dunk. Kid has less than a 36 but has published a paper on research he/she conducted last summer on pancreatic cancer diagnostic testing and a new protocol- yes, that legacy is getting in.
A 36 scorer whose alumni parents are a HS social studies teacher married to a pastor (I know this couple), whose primary EC in HS was studying hard and doing well at school- I’m not seeing it. And I’ve been an involved alumna for decades, starting when Brown wasn’t anywhere near as hard to get into (statistically) as it is today. Legacy plus a high score doesn’t get you in. Sorry, but it doesn’t.
@usualhopeful, good point, 2300, actually 2296.1, I rounded for simplicity, is the self-reported average of matriculated legacy freshmen in the 2018 freshman class survey. http://features.thecrimson.com/2014/freshman-survey/admissions/
Overall admit rate for this class was 5.9% This is the most recent data I found. They didn’t report legacy info the following year. However, the fact that the legacy scores are 56 points higher than the average score for white matriculants makes me think that there were plenty of other legacies who didn’t get admitted despite having scores comparable to non-legacies that did and that being a legacy with scores in that range is far from an auto-admit.
The admissions percent by SAT score were from Princeton https://admission.princeton.edu/applyingforadmission/admission-statistics, since I am not aware of Harvard publishing them, but I was assuming a similar distribution of scores among admitted applicants. (Brown also shows similar increasing admit rates for higher SAT scores, so I don’t think this is something unique to Princeton.) Princeton’s overall admit was 7.1%.
I don’t think there’s any question that legacy status does not “raise the dead.”
But based on the data being posted, it seems that a “qualified” legacy applicant gets a “YUGE” boost, at least compared to the freakishly low acceptance rates of elite institutions.
Then the question becomes: is that a bad thing? I would say no. If two upper middle class suburban kids with high test scores apply - because that probably describes the vast majority of these schools’ applicant pools - and one of those students has legacy status, does it really matter if that student gets in because of the legacy? They are ready for the college’s coursework, etc. and there aren’t any “better” applicants whose spot they are taking. It’s just a tiebreaker in a system with a LOT of ties.
Legacy or not, there is just too much demand for HYPSM / super-elite spots, and they have mostly not responded by significantly increasing their class sizes. The vast majority of qualified applicants are going to be rejected, go to an equally good place perhaps a few steps in USNWR down, and have a fine experience. In many cases they are going to pay a lot less, especially if they go to their state flagship or a scholarship school, earn about the same after going to the same graduate schools, and their lifetime donations are going to go to a different school.
For example in 1950 Harvard admitted about 2000 students (higher than usual because of GI bill) . In 2015 it was about 1600. The US population was 152 million in 1950, and over twice that in 2015 - about 320 million. Harvard was 100% male at the time instead of 50/50, effectively making admission over 5 times more difficult on population alone between 1950 and 2015.
It seems that being LGBTQ at Harvard is an even better hook - admission is 300% higher than the general population.
“It seems that being LGBTQ at Harvard is an even better hook - admission is 300% higher than the general population.”
Didn’t know that.
The Espenshade study says the biggest/best hook is African American. Recruited athlete is almost as strong and has been growing. Somewhat surprising that athletics are so prioritized in admissions since the Ivy League and NESCAC are so small time in the world of college athletics.
Legacy and Latino are a ways back and about the same strength.
“It seems that being LGBTQ at Harvard is an even better hook - admission is 300% higher than the general population.”
It would seem to me that the pool of people who “admit” (poor choice of words, but bear with me) to being LGBTQ is a young pool in general compared to the general population. So it would be no surprise to me that the % of applicants to Harvard who are LGBTQ is substantially higher than the % of the general population as a whole that is LGBTQ.
Anyway, I’d like to see a source that LGBTQ is any kind of hook. I think it may be very common in today’s 18 - 21 yos, but that’s different from a hook.
a. Ivy League is NCAA Division I.
b. Ivy League and NESCAC schools are mostly smaller ones, but the number of athletes needed to field the teams remains similar to larger schools with the same sports. So athletes are a larger percentage of students at those schools than they are at larger schools, including “big time [spectator] sports” schools like Alabama, Arizona State, Texas, Michigan, Ohio State, etc… These schools also have a smaller athlete recruiting pool (higher minimum academic standards for athletes), so they may need to recruit and admit aggressively within the limited recruiting pool (in competition with each other and other schools with lower minimum academic standards for athletes).
^^^^ This. I was very surprised to find that at top NESCAC schools like Amherst, nearly 1/3 of the students are Varsity Athletes. This makes that hook so critical for both the student and the school.
http://athletics.amherst.edu/information/department_information
NOTE: I am not complaining about this. 
The Florida Gators athletic dept has 634 roster spots in its athletic department. Williams College has 954 on an enrollment of 2019.
In its own way, Williams is a bigger football/jock factory than Florida!
1.@DoyleB : I’ll tell you what people are upset about. I had one double-legacy kid whose applications would have been included in the Hurwitz study, and another who applied two years later. Both were rejected. The first was a NMF but had a somewhat imperfect transcript and ECs because of switching schools in the middle of high school, and a history of not caring if she got a B+ in subjects she didn’t care about, so we (and she) understood she was not a perfect candidate. (She did, however, have a lot of externally verified literary achievement, great recommendations, and an experienced interviewer for another Ivy wrote that she was the best applicant he had interviewed in the past 15 years. She wasn’t chopped liver either.) The second child had ultra-high stats, and all of the boxes checked that people on CC obsess about.
That year, I knew 11 legacy kids applying to Yale, none of whom was less than qualified. The one with the least fabulous high school grades was probably the most intellectual; today she is a PhD candidate in philosophy at one of the top 2-3 programs in the country. Only two of them were accepted – both super-great candidates, both accepted everywhere else they applied, too, but many of the ones not accepted were also super-great. It hurts a little to be told that all of them were rejected despite “a brick” in the scale. There wasn’t any brick.
- A big part of what Hurwitz was doing was looking at the results when an applicant who was a legacy at College A applied to College A and also to College B, College C, and College D. So it was the same student, with the same apparent interests, the same recommendations, the same stats and ECs, and probably very similar essays. He controlled for the different selectivity profiles of the four colleges. He excluded ED applicants (unless they were deferred), but included EA applicants. (He also ran all if his numbers with and without including EA applicants, and the differences were negligible.) So those results look pretty powerful.
I think it’s just a pointless waste of time to obsess over “advantages” you can’t change. My kids weren’t URMs, athletes, development candidates, etc. Oh well. Sitting there and gritting your teeth over cards they couldn’t play anyway would have been a waste of time.
There are virtually no slam dunks. Not in the sense we use the term.
Hurwitz, like Espenshade, is smart enough to admit the limits in his study. I hope people are going past others’ digests of the work or any conclusions.
I also think it’s difficult to discuss legacy rejections, speculate on the why. There are many factors that take (or not) a kid from a finalist to an admit. Eg, legacy is difficult to see as a hook if you’re applying from an area with many other legacy kids applying to that target.
I’ll ask again, is there a link where you can get free access to the Hurwitz study? Otherwise most of us are going on others ’ digests of the work. Espenshade’s work is accessible thought it’s been a long time since I looked at it and don’t have a link handy.
According to the NY times article on this work, “Among the 30 colleges, the legacy advantage varied enormously: one college was more than 15 times as likely to accept legacy applicants, while at another, the effect was insignificant.” I’m not sure how you can measure a legacy acceptance rate “more than 15 times as likely” unless your acceptance rate is less than 6.66 percent and your legacy acceptance rate is at or close to 100%. Am I understanding this assertion correctly? Are there any schools other than Stanford and Harvard whose acceptance rates were that low a few years back? Does anyone believe these schools accept all their legacies? I don’t. I’m having a hard time understanding these second-party summaries.
Anyone want to start a separate named thread about the Espenshade/Hurwitz study?