Reflections of an elite legacy parent

Parents Forum
401

I’m happy to volunteer my personal opinion as long as it’s understood that we’re talking about aggregate averages that do not necessarily apply to individual students.

The big question is - what does “weaker” mean?

  1. Does it mean relative to the average student? At the most selective schools, I’d say that legacies on average are about the same as the average student. I’d say they have stronger academic preparation before they enroll (they usually come from stronger high schools, have more opportunities when they’re growing up, can afford test prep so they’ll do better on their SATs, take more APs, etc.). I’d also say they do about as well academically as the average non-legacy student while they’re in college.

  2. Does it mean relative to other groups that receive admissions preferences, such as athletic recruits, URMs, first generation students, etc? In that case I’d say that legacies are probably academically stronger than these other preferenced groups.

  3. On the other hand, legacies are disproportionately white, come from higher SES families, aren’t first generation, etc. If you judge them relative to students with a similar demographic profile, then my guess is they’re probably a little weaker.

In my opinion, somewhat of a mixed bag. Nothing to get an ulcer about either way.

My own observation from over 30 years ago when I attended is that legacies were definitely academically weaker than the average student. But the legacy bump is smaller now and there’s lots of data that things are different today.

Well, we can debate how much schools actually take into account “fit” and “presentation”. However, I will say that if schools are making admissions decisions based on criteria like having a sibling who can make sure they “know the ropes”, then it does seem to me that this would be the ultimate in “perpetuating privilege”.

Lots of poorer or first generation students didn’t grow up hearing folklore concerning the subtle differences among these elite colleges. They are very young and often don’t have adults who can guide them. I for one hope that colleges place much more emphasis on assessing the long-run potential that students have, what they will bring to the campus, and how much of a difference attending the college can make in each student’s life.

402

Any kid can show his fit, if he takes the time to explore just what he is trying to fit into. Harvard, Stanford, etc, aren’t just locked down monoliths and only the insiders get to learn anything about them. You don’t have to grow up breathing it to be worthy. (I used the sib legacy to give a very simple example of knowing more about a college;nothing says the older sib was a legacy, himself, passing down secret info and the keys to his locker at the yacht club.)

Eg, when a school says intellectual vitality matters, or intellectual curiosity, or stretch, it’s a whole lot more than 15 AP. Or that you want to be a neurosurgeon or astrophysicist. When they ask for leadership, it’s not just hs club titles. It can very well be the activated kids, out there in their communities, taking on responsibilities, are showing a lot more leadership than the kid who founds the pie club.

Anyway, anyone with hs kids, try it. And this is some good info from Fitzsimmons http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/harvarddean-part1/?_r=0 (the first question and answer.)

403

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say I grant that with web pages, emails, etc. that in 2016 a diligent high school student can learn everything they want to about a college. Fine.

What did they do before 1996? The internet was not widely used by U.S. high school students from 1636-1996. How were students who didn’t have a personal connection to an elite college supposed to have gotten their information? I suppose they might have had access to a stack of out of date college catalogs in the high school guidance office.

Did colleges just start emphasizing “fit” in the last 20 years or did insiders have a huge advantage up until 20 years ago?? Are admissions officers looking for different things now? Are current admitted classes a lot different than admitted classes from the 90’s or 80’s?

No argument from me here. But these are all about showcasing what a student has accomplished, not about a student researching what they need to highlight on their application in order to show “fit”.

404

It would not be surprising if the level of selectivity at more selective colleges (not just elite ones) has generally increased, due to population growth relative to space in more selective colleges. This means that more colleges are now in the selectivity range where they have so many applicants who are top-end on academic credentials that they need to use other factors to differentiate between them, and the already elite ones have an even large flood of applicants with top-end academic credentials to sort through than they used to.

405

It is not acceptable for a legacy kid to not know about the college and why exactly they want to attend - theoretically anyway although I am not sure a legacy kid without that knowledge would be definitely turned down. But isn’t it expected that a kid with no associations with the college to know little more than “general knowledge” and is somewhat uncertain what they will gain from their elite college experience other than the faith that it will take them to their goals in life? Frankly, I think to show interest and abilities is the applicant’s job but to determine fit is more of the AO’s job. And I don’t think AOs are that picky about “fit” but nonetheless often have to turn down applicants who are as fit as many who are accepted.

406

I should have included that not all kids will have the fit, no matter their academics or how much research. Some of the savvy needs to be present when making choices through high school. Not just the summer or fall they’re rising seniors or before they hit Submit.

It doesn’t matter, today, with today’s resources, how kids became informed 20 or 40 years ago. We do know the number of applications roughly 10 years ago is now roughly doubled, while class size is roughly the same. You can presume the stakes are different. Not a reason not to use what is available now.

Or is it to suggest legacy bore more weight then? So legacy today is flawed? It doesn’t matter. Today’s class will be formed on the merits they seek today.

407

I’m with @al2simon here - the days of clearly mediocre legacies being admitted in large numbers to the tippy-tops are gone. The size and quality of the applicant pool and the number and strength of competing university priorities are just too great now. By and large, unless a legacy is also a recruited athlete or development case, they’re going to be well within the academic mainstream at the school (and maybe toward the higher end of it).

Re: @lookingforward’s points, I get that you have to write an application that stands out from the pile and conveys a sense that the applicant would flourish at the school and make an impact in society. To @panpacific’s point, though, that same application may jump out of the pile at lots of schools (particularly if the applicant is diligent about writing thoughtful and differentiated “why X” essays for each school), leading to cross-admits (and I speak from experience here, knowing more than one person who recently got admitted to most of the Ivy League and a bunch of other schools besides).

Finally, with the tippy-tops getting 30-40k applications, of which they can admit 2k, when probably 20-25k are qualified and 5-10k are truly excellent, there has to be a random element to it. Why this one and not that one? Inevitably, arbitrary distinctions are going to be made, particularly between strong applicants with similar profiles who, to the school, are fundamentally interchangeable. It’s going to come down to who read the application, how they were feeling when they read it, how strongly they advocated for it, the mood of the committee on the day it was discussed and institutional capriciousness (“oh, we need to take this one for that reason, so which one that we otherwise want are we going to throw out?”).

408

Let me just say you misinterpret my point.

409

I think @Prof99 hits the nail on the head. You can not aggregate 30 schools with different definitions of legacy and different levels of selectivity, and talk about the data in very specific terms. As I said in an earlier post, not all data is of similar significance. I am only willing to use official data from the school to make judgements on the quality of legacies at that given school at that given time. The data is messy enough as is, so any attempt at extrapolation has risks.

That said, I introduced the Duke study because it has the cleanest data on legacies I know. While the number (of legacies) can be larger so the results are more stable, I think the data is clear: the legacies at Duke are not as strong as their white non-legacy counterparts, at least at the time the study was done. So, yes, I agree with @al2simon. I also agree with the author that his results would likely hold true for other schools as well.

If we are not trying to be too cute, the use of switching behaviour is a good way to assess student quality. As the ability to think quantitatively is becoming more important, and the schools are becoming more meritocratic, the problem will solve itself over time. I just wish it can be speeded up, that’s all.

410

Note my anecdata about a Duke alum, trustee and fundraiser whose kids got in (one of whom was not Duke material). I think it’s quite possible some schools “dip down” lower in the pool than others. However, scores are still so high at these schools that it’s hard to complain that this is a major problem. If it’s a problem, it’s at the margin.

If you want to talk outrageous “dipping down,” then start talking about big football schools admitting football players who can barely read or write. The “outrage” seems better placed there than at this level.

411

@lookingforward I think his candor may have been considered a breath of fresh air. He had the scores and grades and 5s on all his APs. His application message was a I am a computer geek and very, very good at what I do. His outside recommendations confirmed that and that he could play well with others. Harvard was planning to create a separate engineering school that year, which I’m sure also helped. He had a mile long (honest) list of his reading for the last year as Harvard’s optional essay. He had taken several APs outside the sciences. It was mostly sci fi and fantasy plus math and comp sci books. I always thought he looked more well rounded on paper than he was in real life, but it was clear also that in his field of interest he had gone, way, way, way beyond any curriculum offered in school. He’d taught himself everything.

BTW, I don’t think Harvard had a “Why Harvard?” essay.

412

Also I think Harvard cares less than anywhere else about being everyone’s first choice. It is confident – and based on the data, it should be confident – that practically everyone it admits will enroll there. So @mathmon’s son was part of the reason I had to add “practically” before “everyone.” Nevertheless, I don’t think anyone at Harvard worries about whether its 90% yield will drop to 88%, and no one is going to get a bonus if it goes up to 92%.

Would someone more sophisticated in statistics than I explain what Hurwitz was doing with his “conditional regression” and odds ratios? I thought the enormous strength of the study was that he could look at students who applied to a legacy college and also to one or more reasonably similar non-legacy colleges. I thought he was using regression techniques only to account for the selectivity differences between the colleges, not to control for various measures of student quality like SATs or GPAs, since he admitted there were lots of factors (like recommendations) for which any control was impossible.

413

And didn’t Chelsea turn down Harvard or Yale for Stanford? There are plenty of good reasons to choose one over the other. In retrospect, I should have gone to Yale just for Vincent Scully. (Though I loved the guy I studied Architectural History with and who was one of my thesis advisers.)

414

Actually, they (or any other college) may care if the actual yield is significantly different from the predicted yield, since that can create an over or under enrollment situation.

415

@lookingforward wrote:

I agree. In fact, I think it’s highly likely that they did a good job on their apps, for all the schools they got into. I’m sure that, even if you’re a fantastically high stats kid who has distinguished yourself in various ways, you’d be unwise just to list everything you’ve done, write the app essays in a perfunctory way, and sit back and wait for the acceptances to roll in. Unless you’ve cured cancer or are a recruited athlete or development case, I would guess that approach is unlikely to get you past the gauntlet at the tippy-tops (and maybe not even then). There are too many similarly high-achieving kids who produced better apps.

If, however, you’re thoughtful, have an interesting personal story and tell it well, and are willing to spend the time on the Common App essay, all the different supplements (including the “Why X” essays) and interviews in order to produce packages that make multiple schools see you as a “fit”, you may well be admitted to many of them (assuming you’ve got the baseline stats). Certainly, plenty of kids get multiple bids from top-tier schools every year, and not just because they’re hooked in some way. More than one school apparently considers them to be a “fit”, probably because they took the time to produce the apps that created that impression (and maybe someone who wrote a great app particularly stood out in committee discussions because she played harmonica, but that’s another question).

Finally, I believe that the great majority if not all adcoms are thoughtful, hardworking, competent and have the best intentions. I also believe @lookingforward’s view that the cream rises to the top, as reflected in the apps/supps/interviews. There’s just too much cream for any school’s cup of coffee, though - many more great candidates than can possibly be admitted (and I believe a lot of them produced apps that showed that they would have fit in just fine).

Maybe all those who made it to final committee (leaving the “must-admits” out of the equation), had great apps and “fit”, but I have difficulty believing that the applicants that the school admitted were exactly those who were the “best” fit, had the “best” apps, etc. - particularly when “fit” is such a nebulous concept and depends on the institution’s needs in a given year as it perceives them. Inevitably, some applicants who would have “fit in” equally well, had similar profiles to some who were admitted, etc., are denied for reasons that are essentially arbitrary (and maybe that harmonica player got in because, having cleared all the earlier hurdles with her great app, she - arbitrarily - stuck in the committee’s collective mind).

416

I still don’t understand how a kid with everything plus some super fabulous, for example, community leadership role serves themselves to be a better fit for H vs S vs P.

417

I believe (a) fit exists, but (b) it’s overrated, and © it looks completely different from the perspective of an admissions department than that of a student.

If a student is outdoorsy, mainstream, not so wound up in high culture, I would immediately think “Dartmouth” or “Williams.” And to some extent so would the kid, probably. But Dartmouth and Williams don’t want a whole campus filled with Dartmouth and Williams types. They want some kids there who might prefer Yale or Columbia, or even (gasp!) Bard. The fact that a kid might fit in better someplace else is not necessarily a reason to turn him or her down at a college. It may factor in if the college is worried about yield, but in many cases the admissions staff may say, “This is a terrific applicant, and we want some people like this in our class. If Harvard accepts her, we’ll probably lose her, but let’s accept her and try to convince her to come.”

418

Can a well written application tip the scale? Yes. Does it happen at a high frequency? I don’t think so. Most of applications will fall into the “good, no red flag and as expected” category possibly with a little sparks here and there instead of “blowing your mind and rocking your world” type impressive, and that’s just fine - sufficient for an otherwise well qualified applicant to get in. Is fit something AO will consider? Sure. But can you redact an applicant’s legacy status and expect the same outcome from AO based on the fit shown in the application to the extent that legacy status is ignorable? I doubt it. They do sometimes accept a kid and turn down another with similar profile because the former is a legacy - “no strings attached”. This is why it’s called a “preferential treatment”.

419

What Dart doesn’t want is kids who, um, confuse it with Columbia. Happens here on CC. Think of all the kids desperate for an evaluation of their status as entrepreneurs, for Stanford. And Stanford doesn’t say it’s looking for “entrepreneurs” (not that little blog you started or you program apps-or even that you earned $$ from something.)

What do you think “fit” is? It isn’t robo tailoring yourself to a college, “I can study Neuro 300 wth Professor X, then head for a few hours at Widener and later hang at Harvard Square. With your study abroad, I can go to Milan, rather than Florence.” That’s not even thinking at the level the school operates at.

Make certain mistakes and a great essay (oh, what’s a great essay?) won’t be a big enough band-aid. Go back to how this is about culling.

Why wouldn’t D or W want a consistency in D or W types (which is very broad and can tolerate and thrive in the locations?) Why would they be so eager to accept a kid who clearly is Columbia/big school/big city (and folks, some kids say these sorts of things) or the (more or less) Bard profile? Can’t you imagine a not-desperate adcom saying, well, let him go to Bard? Or Hampshire or Sarah Lawrence?

420

Actually, @panpacific, I think it’s the converse (and in this sense, I agree with @lookingforward). I believe a lot of applications from kids with really strong stats and ECs get denied because the rest of the package doesn’t sing. Think about it: if Harvard denies half the applicants who have perfect toll-free scores, why do you think that is? You might say: because they give out so many spots to athletes, URMs, legacies, development cases, etc., and leave it at that. This is the point at which uncountable CC threads spiral into arguments about perceived injustice in tippy-top admissions. But you have to go on to ask yourself: how did Harvard decide which half of the toll-frees to admit? The half that they denied had, by definition, exactly the same tip-top scores (and, I’m willing to bet, GPAs, ECs, etc., that were very similar) to the group that they accepted. Did they say: this one had a 4.5 GPA with 10 AP 5s and that one had 4.5 with only 9 5s, so we’ll accept the first one? Or they liked this one’s internship better than that one’s? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way. They look at the total package, including the app/supp/interview, and if on reading it they think Toll-Free #1 has done really well on tests and in school but his app was deadly dull and little more than a recitation of achievements and cliches, while Toll-Free #2’s app tells a great story about who they are and what they’re likely to become, I suggest it’s much more likely they’ll take Toll-Free #2.