“These students are more privileged, so they are better prepared academically, giving them the courage to take harder courses in their first year.” If they are better prepared academically, do they come in with more and higher AP scores, and do they take those AP credits more than other students? And do they then learn that AP classes aren’t always as good as a college intro class, or that college freshmen haven’t developed the study skills that college sophomores have?
Regardless of someone hanging too much on genetics, or whether some colleges are tougher now, it doesn’t mean adcoms can’t do their job, admit the right kids, as they and the college define them.
The kids a tippy top wants are bright and accomplished, but with the personal skills to succeed as the college sees it. That’s so much more than getting A grades or honing in to the very most challenging classes. Think about what the college experience means to you (oops, maybe it means future job success or bragging rights over a PBK key- but that’s not what you see if you dig into the colleges’ discussions of their values, what they look for.)
This discussion wants to turn to getting into finance, making the big bucks, donating 10M+. Find me a tippy top that says, we want kids who will go into IB and donate big. Even Yale, which talks about ‘future leaders,’ has gone on to discuss the small ways leadership manifests and the lasting influences on others. Think about it.
Please, if you want to keep talking about finance recruitment, could you start your own thread? Some of us are interested in talking about legacies.
“It is also important to note that the data alone does not tell the whole story. The author was only comparing legacies to white non-legacies and not white non-hooks. Among hooked students, he has only factored out URMs and ORMs. The presence of white athletes, scions of the rich, famous and powerful etc. actually make the legacies look better than they really are.”
OK, but I’m still having trouble with the assertion that a group that, at least at Harvard, has SAT scores 56 points higher than the average white student and just 8.4 points lower than the average Asian student is “academically weak”.
Legacies can be athletes too, and athletes are likely more represented in the legacy pool as opposed to the Asian pool. Many sports require substantial financial resources and parental commitment. Are legacies a privileged group yet dramatically under-represented among athletes?
@Pizzagirl There are obviously more than one way to achieve power, but make no mistake money IS power. regardless, money or power, to most 22 year olds, it’s just a high paying job we are talking about. Somehow, the few industries have developed some sort of validating power for new graduates. Getting in and out of theses firms is like a selective camp, which in itself opens doors for futures opportunities.
@lookingforward I guess we can’t have it both ways when Harvard don’t take academic endeavors and capabilities as the highest priorities in their admission practice and accepts a great number of sons and daughters of lawyers and financiers and then 4 years we magically expect the best ones out of Harvard overwhemlmingly go for academics and nonprofit…
“Somehow, the few industries have developed some sort of validating power for new graduates. Getting in and out of theses firms is like a selective camp, which in itself opens doors for futures opportunities.”
There are thousands of fabulous, satisfying, well paid careers that have nothing to do with these fields. It’s a self-referential bubble who think that these are “the” careers. It’s stupid to say that only HYP offers a future, and it’s stupid to say only finance offers a future.
Panpacific: academic performance is the first bar. It is neither the only nor the penultimate. Think about kids you know. And the bar is not set at 2300. Lots of people can tell you that.
I think some misunderstand. A legacy admit is by no means guaranteed at any elite. It is not a “preference,” (not, "We prefer legacies.) It’s a consideration.There is no one-two punch that says a legacy has anything it takes to impress or that he has any real chance of getting in, no matter how many eyes see his file.
Some of this thread is going in circles. I do wonder if you read what H looks for, as one example. If a tippy top can cherry pick, and if some kids present both the academic strengths and the rest of what they want in their community, isn’t it logical they have the better shot? With that many apps for so few seats, why wouldn’t they choose what they see as “best” in multiple ways? Not just stats. Imagine it.
So people fall back on a complaint it’s black box- without doing their due diligence. Or they so firmly believe it’s a crapshoot that they fall short of trying to match beyond stats. Then they complain some category has an edge. Who’s to blame?
The bad news is that too many kids can’t reasonably answer a Why Us. See it all the time on CC and IRL. Partly because they don’t know, beyond “you have my major” or “I want a top school and you’re a top school.” (Really.) Or silliness about how they dreamed of elite X since they were in kindergarten (sorry, also real.) Or, “I want to be a doc and you will prepare me best to get into a top med school.”
Black box? What does it say to you, when a kid can’t look deeper and a top college is expecting kids who can?
“I guess we can’t have it both ways when Harvard don’t take academic endeavors and capabilities as the highest priorities in their admission practice and accepts”
They don’t? Where do these students wind up, then? East Nowheresville State? Or do they wind up in (say) USN 10 through 40, in which case no harm no foul?
@Pizzagirl @lookingforward I am saying the way Harvard admits and the outcome in terms of graduates’ career choices (including the diversity and the directions or leaning) are consistent, IMO. And I am not criticizing the admission policies because I think that is how Harvard wants to build its communities and it’s fitting Harvard’s missions and goals. That’s all.
http://features.thecrimson.com/2014/senior-survey/
If someone is so inclined, tear this apart on another thread. But I wouldn’t say it shows the conclusions many think. It does show one can sometimes find a bit more input than they assume.
@lookingforward If one of the observations you refer to is the declining “interest” in finance over years, it’s partly because that industry is getting smaller and the bad publicity of over working workers caught on. However those who would be in finance most likely end up in consulting, Google and Amazon… So like I said the “essence” remains the same.
Awwe, shucks. Now I suppose I should have told my Duke legacy son to have picked Columbia, UPenn, Chicago, or Northwestern (all places where he was also admitted) over Duke (where he chose) so parents on the internet don’t accuse him of being “weaker” than his classmates.
I guess there’s still time for my junior D.
(and no, we don’t have a ton of money, are we not specially connected, we are not URMs, and he is not an athlete…)
(and yes, I’ve read these boards for years and have never felt moved enough to register until I read this thread)
:)>-
P.S. Pizzagirl and JHS - have read your posts for years and have always enjoyed them, even when we disagree.
I agree with @mathyone, so I’m going to take this back to legacies, and provide some math.
Yale, to pick one example, has disclosed that there were 30,236 applicants for the Yale College class of 2019, 1,963 (6.5%) were admitted and 1,364 enrolled, of which 10.4% are legacies. Yale informs alumni that it admits on average around 20% of legacy applicants. This implies (assuming a 90% yield on legacies admitted) that 788 legacies applied, 158 were admitted and 142 enrolled.
If legacies were admitted at the rate of the class as a whole, 51 would have received offers and 46 would have enrolled (still assuming 90% yield). So, you could try to argue that legacies had an advantage that provided them 96 “extra” spots (or about 7% of the class) - except that it’s unlikely to be nearly that number. Why? Because you would expect, on merit alone, for legacies to have a much higher admit rate than the overall pool.
Jeffrey Brenzel, then-dean of undergraduate admissions, told the New York Times in 2011 that the legacies scored 20 points higher on the (then two-part) SAT than the rest of the class. There’s no reason to think this has changed, but let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that legacies have scores exactly in line with the rest of the class nowadays (yes, some took the ACT, but the following argument still works because the relevant numbers are similar).
Well, Yale disclosed that 50.8%, 49.9% and 49.4% of the class of 2019 had scores of 760 or better in the verbal math and critical reading sections of the SAT respectively. So, it follows that the average admitted legacy scored approximately 2280. If that’s the case, and the rest of their applications were of similar quality, I don’t think you can argue that Yale is bending over backwards to admit legacies and that many clearly better-qualified applicants are being denied as a result.
At that level, it comes down to the individual aspects of the application - the “holistic” view - and you would expect children of Yale graduates, all things being equal, to have parents who care about education and are willing and able to give their children exposure to more opportunities than the average applicant, resulting in stronger applications. You would expect, that is, for the legacies to have a significantly higher admit rate than the overall applicant pool. The parents may also be generous with their time and money to the school, which could tip the scale for an otherwise highly-qualified applicant. Finally, clearly some legacies have another hook, such as being a recruited athlete, URM or development case, that would have given a big boost to their applications anyway.
Yale and its peer schools all could fill their classes many times over with highly-qualified applicants and Yale denies 80% of its legacy applicants, many of which are also likely to be highly-qualified. I would guess that in most cases the legacy is just a feather that seals the deal for someone who’d be admitted anyway, by making the application stand out from a pile of others that could all plausibly be successful and are fundamentally interchangeable from the school’s point of view.
The slightly higher score isn’t a factor in legacy advantage because Hurwitz compared legacy versus non-legacy with similar scores, if I understand his method correctly (conditional logistic regression).
This could be the real basis for the legacy advantage. In that case the rest of us have no right to complain because we don’t know as much.
Do those who object to legacy boost (of whatever size) also object to faculty-children boosts? I can see it being a part of retention strategy. Is that “fair”?
In private or public schools?
My kids not only would presumably have had a faculty boost at the college where dh taught, but would also have had free tuition. Unfortunately it would have been a terrible fit for both of them.
They are not academically weak. That was your term. They are simply academically weaker than the students with no hooks. Everything is relative. The other thing to remember is that the Harvard document is self-reporting, with no mechanism in place for verification. Take it with a grain of salt.
Since the Duke legacies took harder courses in their first year than the median, logic tells me they probably also took harder courses in their senior year of high school and did very well on them. What are the odds of finding a category of varsity athletes that take harder courses in their senior year, and also their freshman year, on any campus? If you were to substitute athletes with physics majors, however, then we are talking.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Edited last paragraph to be more clear, as per user.
“They are simply academically weaker than the students with no hooks.” Which students with no hooks? Are you referring to the average white students whose SAT scores were 56 points lower?
OK, the average white SAT score was 2239. The average recruited athlete score was 2068.4 and they were 11% of total students. Let’s be generous to the poor unhooked white admits, and assume that all recruited athletes were white and that no legacies were also recruited athletes (or development cases, despite having a very high average income, or URM either, despite only 89% reporting white, nah, none of them could be a primary legacy URM who happens to be the kid of a famous astrophysicist, or a secondary legacy URM who happens to be the kid of the president). Accounting for 11% of the non-legacy white SAT score having an average of 2068.4 puts the average of the rest at 2260. Still 38 points lower than the “academically weaker” legacy pool.
I’m not disputing that legacies are receiving some admissions preference. I’m just not seeing that the preference they are getting is over students who are significantly more academically qualified. If anything, one could say that other white admits received preference over more academically qualified legacies.
Silly fuss, isn’t it.
OP started this thread about feelings and we get to such contention.
Besides that, anyone with his or her eyes open knows tippy tops want more than (oh, have we said this, over and over?) stats. Across the categories, 'cepting recruited athletes.