Reflections of an elite legacy parent

Parents Forum
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Very interesting and thoughtful thread and sorry I am late to the discussion that has arisen latest.

@Blue and @lookingforward, based on our experience with DD and DS and being v involved with 2 ivy alumni associations (knowing their regional admissions people etc.), I think it’s really a bit of both.

More broadly, I’d say that @Postmodern seems to have it pretty close to how it seems to work in my observational experiences with our kids and those of close friends in similar situations. I’ve also been told anecdotally by a number of adcoms that the breakdown of ivy-elite kids is really more along the lines of: 10% in b/c they’re so academically overpowering plus great package; 20% in b/c they are (i) recruited athlete; (ii) identified by the school in some other area (arts, music, chemistry, etc.) as a person they really want to get; (iii) development/legacy hooked; (iv) URM; and (v) FGC - or some of all of those; and 10% deny b/c they don’t meet the basic numbers – leaving 60% more or less of the class to be pulled from a pile of highly qualified, capable people. That latter section is where all of the gnashing of teeth, etc. from the schools, students and parents comes from - how to make oneself stand out in that competitive, subjective effort on the one hand and how to offer admission to the right applicants on the other.

As some others on this thread have stated, I think it is an effort to solve more orthogonal vectors than many think… Consider, for example that all of these top-top schools want/need a class that is broadly racially and economically diverse, culturally diverse, has students from all 50 US states + a reasonable (and growing) group of int’l applicants, PLUS balance in terms of intended course of study, and point of view/interest as well as keeping the sports teams, theatrical/music departments and the fine arts all reasonably well stocked with incoming recruits. After all, that is for the most part one of their collective strongest selling points and they can’t back off it (unless, I guess you’re CalTech or MIT in which case you can be SO dominant in a field or set of related fields) that it doesn’t matter).

I really do believe based on all of the factors they’re trying to solve for that it is by necessity a holistic approach with an eye to yield and overall class composition. One additional tidbit that I have heard from senior admissions people at three different v elite schools (and that may be lost on some here) is that they also try to look (in addition to all of the other factors you’ve been discussing) for situations where attendance is going to be a positive, potentially life changing or life-directing experience. Why? Because these schools play the long game and they know based on their own stats that students who feel that way tend overall to perform better in school and do more on campus; and they also tend to be relatively successful out of school, and more importantly, that these folks attribute that success disproportionately to their alma mater and as a result make good alumni. They donate time and money, and act as ambassadors for the school in their respective personal and professional communities.

I’ve no idea how the admissions people make those sorts of judgments, but I have seen and heard it too many times for it not to have at least some kernel of truth. So, I do think that they are being as transparent as they can when describing what they look for - it’s just different every year in one degree or another.

None of that IMO should really be a source of parental frustration; IMO it’s just important to understand (and coach your applicant kids if possible) and grasp that even with all the best objective criteria applied there is still a subjective, opaque component that is going to be applied in the end - and while it won’t matter in most cases it will be the last ounce on the scales in the coin-flip close calls.

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@Ohiodad51
From what I know there are many reasons why some of the most selective schools don’t publish their legacy stats, starting with not wanting to make it either (a) an arms-race among wealthy alumni; or (b) yet another source of complaint by students and parents.

FWIW, the best legacy advice I have heard is the common sense one: If your child is a legacy, has an interest in the legacy school and is on-paper a qualified admit, there’s little reason not to apply. At worst you get no advantage, and at best you could get a material leg up. No downside other than the effort and $ of the application. =

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6 years ago when we visited a dozen or so colleges, I wrote up for CC my impressions for each as to what I felt were each college’s mission, values, mores and what would be the ultimate compliment that they would give to an alum (“you make us proud because you really exemplify …”). This was a holistic impression based on how the schools presented themselves - what they chose to emphasize in presentations, what students tended to talk about, what posters were in the student center … All of that info collated in my head and distilled into a few paragraphs. This helped crystallize for us difference between schools that were all perfectly fine academically, and provided my kids a roadmap as to how to talk about their particular interests and what they would bring to that campus.

I don’t pretend that my observations were perfect, but it strikes me that there are people who can do this - who can intiit what a campus wants holistically - and people for whom you might as well ask them to grow a third leg. They simply can’t look at a school’s environment and presentation and intuit what they value (beyond generalities) and therefore they keep asking “what are they looking for, I don’t get it.”

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The year my kid applied, Northwestern absolutely published their legacy acceptance rate versus the “regular” rate. They sent it in an email to all alumni who opted in for communication from them. I copied the letter in its entirety and put it on CC, probably in the NU forum. I seem to recall that it was double the regular rate (something like 30% vs 15% in those days) but I may be misremembering. In any case, it was plenty transparent as far as I was concerned. Still nothing even remotely resembling a guarantee, and prepare for rejection.

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^ Yes (PG/442) But what we asked ourselves, for D1, was: “They will like her because…” And the answers weren’t high school-y. Not she started a pencil drive or won an atendance award. It was about the attributes she could show.

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I don’t disagree with a lot of what you’re saying, @panpacific (in fact, I’ve seen some of it at close range myself, and commented on it downthread), but it’s beside the point. No one said hooks don’t matter, or were always less important than essays. The point is that essays and the rest of the app are critically important for most applicants (and, frankly, for most legacies).

At your prep school, I’m going to guess that the legacies are generally full payers, and their families may have been quite generous to their alma maters, so they’re what I’d call “connected legacies”. They might even be development cases, URMs or recruitable for some sport, which would make them double-hooked. Finally, if it’s a high-quality prep school, those legacies have probably had a great education and a lot of test prep, making them strong applicants anywhere and likely to do well at whatever college they attend. I would guess that, if they didn’t call it a day after being admitted early to the legacy college, they were probably admitted to other elite colleges where they had no connection (and, consequently, where their apps mattered a lot more than their nonexistent legacy hooks).

Being at the same prep school, your kids were also getting the advantages of that education and were immeasurably privileged relative to the broader population of college applicants. You might ask yourself whether they would have been admitted to the colleges they’re attending if they’d gone to school somewhere else, and whether the fact that they were born to parents who could send them to the prep school is much fairer than the fact that their legacy classmates were born to parents who could do the same and also happened to attend a particular college.

The price of the privilege your kids enjoyed was (i) that they had to compete directly against some legacies, and not just any legacies, but some of the best of the legacies, members of the 20-30% of legacy applicants that the tippy-tops admit (some of whom were probably double-hooked), and (ii) the fact that at prep schools such as yours, there’s generally an abnormally high concentration of legacies and, with a fixed class size, a college is only going to accept so many applicants in one year from one school. And in spite of all that, as you say, many non-legacy kids are admitted to the tippy-tops every year from that school and others like it (and, although you didn’t mention it, I’m sure some of the legacies at your prep school are denied at their legacy tippy-tops).

You seem to think legacy is really powerful, but, as I noted in a previous post, it only looks that way when it’s combined with a whole lot of other factors that tend to make for a really strong application and an applicant that’s likely to do very well wherever they go, something that’s only found in large quantities in the rarefied prep school world you and your kids inhabit. And it doesn’t look very powerful at all to the 70-80% of legacies that the tippy-tops deny every year, many of whom wonder whether they might have been admitted if they’d gone to a school like the one your kids attended.

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The only guy I knew who went to Dartmouth was an African American city kid who was gay and not athletic at all. Not the stereotype - especially back then. He loved it because it was so different from what he’d grown up with.

Both my kids basically presented themselves in their best light, trying to convey that they the sort who delved extra deep into things that interested them - both scholarly and not so scholarly. They didn’t tailor the applications to each school so much as try to find schools that might appreciate who they were. My younger son who was pretty sure he’d go into International Relations, had nothing that looked like a potential IR major really so he mostly just told colleges he was undecided on his major. His biggest ECs were Science Olympiad and orchestra.

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When Yale started the build-out on Science Hill and then acquired a huge site in West Haven (the town next door) and announced expansion of Life Sciences, Engineering, consolidation of various grad programs in science and health, etc it seemed pretty clear that kids who had an interest in any of these subjects-- and had the overall stats for Yale- ought to put Yale on their list even if their GC’s were telling them that Yale was a weak choice for a STEM kid vs. Cornell or Princeton.

When the tour guides at Cornell make the hole in the ground (which will be the nanotechnology lab when completed) the highlight of the tour- doesn’t that say “you may think of us for hotel, labor relations, and psychology (all historically strong disciplines) but you should think of us for cutting edge technology as well”?

Are you suggesting a punch list on the admissions website for each college which states “these are our institutional priorities”? I’m suggesting that a 17 year old kid with access to the internet can learn several things about a college- even if he/she can’t afford to visit and do the tour. And one of those things is likely to be where the college is putting its investment dollars and what the implications are from an educational perspective.

Similarly- a college announces that it is phasing out its linguistics major and only offering a concentration- guess what kids- linguistics not likely to be around much longer. A college announces that it is selling off several Egyptian artifacts from its museum to “consolidate its collection around its core holdings in 19th and 20th century painting” it seems to be a good indication that a wannabee Near Eastern Studies major or archaeology major might want to look elsewhere.

This stuff isn’t quite so mysterious as some of you folks make it out to be.

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Right. I think it’s simply insane to conflate the kinds of legacy families who are sending their kids to elite boarding schools with “everyday vanilla” legacy families, who are just everyday upper middle class worker bees like the rest of us.

And the “unfairness” of an elite boarding school kid having to compete with legacy classmates sounds really, really hollow to me when elite boarding schools themselves are the very definition of privilege compared to what 99% of high schoolers in this country have access to. I notice no one in that situation feels concern for the bright high schooler in the rural high school where the football coach teaches physics every other year. That’s not the unfairness that concerns people, apparently. It’s not REALLY about educational inequity.

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@lookingforward, what I wrote was I don’t know what makes Princeton different from Harvard, or why one non athlete kid would be admitted to one and not the other. And I have read and appreciated your advice before, but if you believe you can get a “good read” on the things Harvard is looking for vis Princeton, I’d appreciate the example and I don’t believe that I am alone.

@pizzagirl, maybe you are better at this than I am, but if you “can intuit what a campus wants holistically” such that you can distinguish the different factors favored by say Penn over Northwestern, then surely you are perceptive enough to understand that many otherwise intelligent people can not. How exactly does that benefit the colleges?

I am still waiting for an intelligible answer as to why colleges would not be less opaque about what they value, assuming that this information is already discernible by some with a special insight. It seems to me that the process is either more randomized than what we would like to think (which I doubt is the case) or Harvard et al don’t really mind drawing these “lottery” type applications.

And just to head off the obvious rejoinders, of course no school at this level can or should say “we like debate captains but not key club presidents”, or “four year tuba playing female plus a 1550 and from North Dakota and you are in”. Nor am I full steam ahead on getting my kid into Harvard. My daughter has pretty good mix of schools (no Ivys) and I am confident she will land in a spot where she will have the tools to succeed. So this is not some plea for why can’t my kid go to a good school?

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Let me offer an imperfect analogy. You’re in the business world and you offer your identical services to Client A and Client B. Can’t you tell just from what they say, how they approach you, the nature of your interaction that A is no-nonsense, wants just the facts, wants to hear your recommendation and then go away and think about it and get back to you – and B needs a lot more hand-holding, wants to work collaboratively, wants to establish relationships with you and your staff, likes personal small talk and is delighted as heck that you remember his kid’s birthday?

A and B didn’t need to put up on a website these specific things that they each are looking for. Indeed, they might not be able to articulate it to themselves, much less to you. You can easily figure it out by just listening, learning, absorbing, thinking about what interactions really mean.

If you can figure out that A wants to be approached one way and that you do best with A when you do such-and-such, whereas you do best with B when you emphasize something completely different, why is this any different with colleges? It’s just reading the signals institutions send the same way you read signals people send.

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Well said @Ohiodad51. I, for one, have read the Harvard website, including the What We Look For section and the link that takes you to the series of questions the student is to consider when putting his application together. I guess I’m not Harvard material because while the exercise is worthwhile (and one I would expect to be pretty basic as a precursor to starting any application), I don’t see anything there that tells me that Harvard is looking for something that is distinctly different from what Princeton seeks.

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@lookingforward, I actually did read the Fitzsimmons article - thanks for posting. I don’t think what I wrote (which was supposed to be a proxy for the peer schools as well as Harvard itself) was overall inconsistent with it. From what I can tell, all the apps get read, and then the subcommittees discuss and vote on which candidates to bubble up to the next level. I think this is how @gibby describes the process at Harvard; if the regional adcoms don’t send your app to the full committee to be discussed and advocated for there, you’re denied by default.

Inevitably, each reader will have favorites they argue strongly for, which they’ve necessarily chosen by comparison to the others in the pool, as a result of reading all the applications and judging them holistically. Am I misunderstanding something, or do you think I said something different?

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Harvard isn’t looking for anything distinctly different from what Princeton seeks, at least not these days. There was a time when Princeton valued athletics and preppiness more than Harvard, and when Princeton accepted a handful of complete brainiacs but then passed on the others in favor of normal suburban valedictorians/class presidents/crew captains. But that time has passed.

One difference that’s easy to see: Dartmouth asks for a peer recommendation. At least historically, half the class at Harvard couldn’t get a positive peer recommendation to save their lives.

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This may be a subtle distinction, but IMO it’s not so much that H looks for something appreciably different from P (et al); it’s that each college has a slightly different self-conception of what they think they are looking for, or what they pride themselves on being all about.

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@DeepBlue86 @Pizzagirl I am not complaining about any “unfairness”. I don’t think it’s unfair (never said that anywhere) and I am not a victim of the current system… I just don’t agree essay plays such an important role in the application process. Frankly, in this discussion of legacy advantage, it’s a distraction. Good essays are a dime a dozen, - in the eyes of beholders anyway. In the 5% admission game, it wouldn’t take you closer to the goals as a legacy status would. In other words, hypothetically, if there are two applicants with exactly identical profile, one a legacy with a good essay and the other non-legacy with an excellent essay, I can’t say which one will definitely win, but I think the legacy will win more times. That’s just my personal take on it. If nothing else, I’d go dig on what “preferential treatment” means. But I haven’t run a double blinded test on the theory, so don’t quote me on that! :slight_smile:

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@panpacific : actually, I think if it were your non-legacy kid with an excellent essay, and all the advantages that come from their prep school education, vs. a lower-middle-class, public school legacy with the same stats and a good essay, I think your kid would win every time.

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Put me down as a “moderate” in this debate.

To me, there’s no question that some schools have a “brand”. For example, U. of Chicago’s brand was very clearly “we’re intellectuals” (at least before the current Dean of Admissions took over). They wanted those types of students and those types of students wanted them.

Clearly MIT has a very strong “STEM & hacker” brand / culture.

But @Ohiodad51 's question about Harvard vs. Princeton is an interesting one. What are their brands? At least in Harvard’s case, it’s very simple - it’s

Historically, Harvard has owned this brand in the US.

I would say that Princeton has more or less pursued this same brand but with a “we’re undergraduate focused” spin on it. People have also historically associated them with being preppy, etc.

I would say that Yale’s and Stanford’s primary brand is the same as well, but they have a few stronger spins on it, like being more artsy, entrepreneurial / future-oriented, athletic, etc.

Of course, every university - with the possible exception of Stanford in recent years - has been a bit in Harvard’s shadow, so people who are trying to draw distinctions pay more attention to the “spin” rather than to the “primary” aspects of the brand. I think they might be missing the forest for the trees.

So that's why the question of "what is it that Harvard is looking for versus Princeton and Yale" is tougher to answer than "what is it that Chicago or MIT are looking for". HYPS are all mostly just looking for the same thing - applicants who are very good students and who've really excelled in something. So the "fit" question for these schools isn't that important in my opinion.

Of course, many less selective schools have to deliberately cultivate a brand because they need to worry about attracting students and getting enough tuition dollars to keep running. Most colleges are in this boat.

But many (not all) elite universities are able to aspire to the same “we’re the best” brand … that’s why people call them “elite” :slight_smile: So, it’s no surprise that they’re mostly looking for the same thing in their students. That’s why I don’t think “unique fit” is as important as some people make it out to be for these universities.

However, it’s a spectrum. The more a school has a brand / culture that is different from the generic “we’re the best” brand, the more they’re going to be looking for unique things in their students … schools like MIT, small LAC’s, women’s schools, etc are obvious examples.

P.S. Of course, to the average person on the street all these schools have the same brand … they’re all a bunch of smarty-pants, stuck-up, elitist snobs :slight_smile:

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Which historical era? I’d have been happy to give a positive peer recommendation to any of the six students in my class that Harvard accepted.

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@TallTim I agree with most of what you’re saying, except I think the picture for the unhooked is even bleaker. I believe the tippy-tops each on average tend to admit 180-200 athletes per year (about 10% of the admits) a similar number of legacies, a similar number of cockeyed geniuses, somewhat more URMs, roughly 100 for development/celebrity/miscellaneous institutional reasons and roughly 50 first-gens (obviously, these are estimates and some will vary significantly by school). That’s close to 50% of the admits right there, and although there will undoubtedly be some significant overlap (e.g., between URMs and first-gens), if there are 30-40k total applicants, the rest of the class will be filled by roughly 3-5% of the unhooked applicant pool. That’s why this game is so hard, and why it inevitably has a random aspect.