“Be careful when you look at what % of a class is legacy. That’s a reflection of how “popular” the school is among the legacy parents, but it doesn’t necessarily mean legacies get a boost.”
To really speak to this, you’d have to do a very detailed academic study. One where you could see the detailed admissions files and compare non-legacy apples to legacy apples. The studies by Hurwitz and Espenshade conclude that the legacy boost is actually quite substantial. More than people think. Hurwitz in particular tries to control for athletes, test scores and lots of other factors. So I’m going with his conclusions that the boost is quite significant, even though most legacies still get rejected.
But you have to view “substantial” in context. Assume legacy is nothing more than a tie-breaker. That means no dummies get in. But these schools have incredibly selective admissions standards, so lots and lots and lots of applicants are basically tied.
If you are in a selection process where there are lots of ties, being able to win the coin flip is YUGE!!
I wonder how much of this depends on the profile and personal proclivities of the person reading the application
For example, I would think that the typical Adcom earning a comparatively nominal salary is not going to look favorably on applicants she/he thinks were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, because Mom or Dad went to that super selective school. If this adcom says “Deny” on the application, even if the student is legacy, where will that be overridden for an “ordinary legacy”? In Committee, will the Admission Director step in, pull rank and say “No, we want this kid, because he/she is legacy?” I doubt it.
My guess is that college administration is more likely to look on legacies favorably than rank and file adcoms. So the question might come down to how decisions are made at individual schools and where in the admissions process the senior Admin folks step in to change or override initial decisions made by the initial reader of the file. Or maybe at some schools, legacy applications are read by different readers than the generic pile, that again could skew the results.
My wife and I went to the wrong schools for legacy to work. S in their polite letter said legacies have a 10% admit rate, they also do not have ED. My wife went to UChic, and my D is too normal for that school, not good at responding to strange essay questions.
"For example, I would think that the typical Adcom earning a comparatively nominal salary is not going to look favorably on applicants she/he thinks were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, because Mom or Dad went to that super selective school. "
You’ve got two kids from (insert your favorite affluent zip code of choice). Kid A is a legacy, Kid B isn’t. Why would the adcom think that Kid A was one bit more “silver spoon” than Kid B? Presumably both had smart parents who worked hard to amass enough money to live in that zip code.
If anything, if we are talking RD here, our adcom can bet that Kid A may be more likely to accept the offer (yield) than Kid B.
Despite what adcoms make, they are HARDLY in the business of turning people away because they make a lot of money. You wouldn’t have so many full pay kids (legacy or not) and so many fancy boarding school kids if that were the case.
Each adcom reads a lot of apps, sometimes from an entire state. His/her pool will have a lot of kids from all kinds of backgrounds. The question is who is the adcom more likely to empathize with. This is plain in-group/out-group bias that many humans exhibit. If you cant relate to an applicant, you aren’t likely to treat them favorably. I’m not saying that they are all biased. I am just pointing out that Adcoms are not rich, don’t make a lot in terms of pay are are more likely to identify with folks who are similar to them. There are very few folks on the admission committee except perhaps the director of admissions who might even move around in the social circles that a typical legacy applying to a super selective school might move around in.
Oh, gag on the “social circles for a legacy.” The majority are just plain vanilla upper middle class who work for a living like everyone else. Don’t turn this into Thurston Howell III.
Anyway, if these adcoms can’t objectively read kids from all backgrounds, how can they possibly read ANY kid from New Trier or Scarsdale or Choate, legacy or not? Do they resent the non-legacy kids from affluent schools as well or as much? If so, how come they admit so darn many of them?
Give elite adcoms more credit than petty jealousy. And do you not read about multiple reviews as kids progress?
RD yield is hard to predict on an individual basis. They can look more at the high school history of matriculating kids. Or other points the kid may have revealed. Sometimes, the kid tells college X he likes it for reasons that don’t even apply. In RD, you don’t know if even a legacy wants to attend or prefers another school. I always wonder if those golf kids from the year round play areas, who claim golf is their lives, really want to go up to the NE. Legacy or not.
The first key is in the application itself. Kid has a clue? Kid can show it?
Adcoms are more likely to like kids who are on the mark, who know the school, can think and present a good app, are open, have challenged themselves beyond the number of APs and some handlful of clubs, who make some difference, no arrogance, no hiding. And that can come from any SES.
^^^ Aren’t a large percentage of adcoms, especially the younger ones, often graduates of the school they work at? I know it is not always the case.
I have only anecdotal information on this, but the large majority of the recent schools we have visited the adcom leading the presentation mentioned they were an alumnus. Only exception was Yale, and the gentleman there said he was only leading the meeting because everyone else was on vacation. (He is in the infamous video though, and was super pleasant inter-personally).
I would think they wouldn’t think less of fellow alumni who are probably older and making more $$$ – in fact many of them probably see themselves in their shoes someday, both financially and wrt family applying. Just my opinion, I could not find any facts to back this up or dispute it.
I trot this out all the time, but not yet in this thread. There is persistent folklore from inside the Harvard and Yale admissions departments that there is no meaningful difference between their acceptance rate for their own legacies and their acceptance rate for the other's and Princeton's legacies. (Of course, those people go through the regular process, and don't get any supposed boost.) It's likely that the same holds true at Princeton, too. In other words, all but a point or two of the so-called legacy advantage at those schools is really a children-of-generally-affluent-sophisticated-parents-who-value-elite-education advantage.
That corresponds to what I have observed in real life: Most of the kids admitted to their legacy school, if they apply elsewhere, are accepted at equivalent colleges, and some who are rejected are accepted at equivalent colleges. When my son was applying to Yale, he had three good friends who were also Yale legacies applying there. One got into Yale and everywhere else she applied, One was rejected at Yale but accepted at Harvard and Oxford. The other was rejected everywhere that was extremely selective at the time, as was my son. My best friend from college has had both of his children accepted at Yale, and also at every other college to which they applied, including Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, and Williams. My last Harvard legacy cousin was also accepted at Yale, Stanford, and MIT. And among my kids’ friends was a fourth generation Princeton legacy who was outright rejected EA at Princeton then accepted at Harvard RD. The legacy boost is a needle in a haystack.
My experience of college admissions staff is that they are very gung-ho on the college and looking to replicate its special character. Almost all are alumni. They include legacies themselves. They also want to champion kids on whom more senior staff will agree -- they want to please their bosses. They are not inherently prejudiced against legacies.
Sorry about the cutesiness of "single-initial college." I am not writing for the real world, I'm writing for CC.
I don’t think you can say they’re almost all alums unless you check. What you can say is they almost all have equivalent experience. If someone’s going to stay in admissions for a while, my observation is they can migrate to/from somewhat like schools. When you’re facing down 25-40k apps, most of the process is culling to get to the few(er) serious candidates. There is plenty of room for dissent- as well as going to bat for a kid the prior reviewer may not have fully appreciated.
I think the legacy boost rests on the kid’s actual application and supp. Look, we all see chance and results threads. We know so many kids don’t know much about even their dream colleges. Now imagine an adcom reading that package, holistically, with that idea of “replicating the special character” and kids who don’t seem to know what it is (or show the match.) “You have my major.” “I like NYC.” “You’re a top school and I want a top school.”
48% of admission counselors who are responsible for screening and making initial decisions on freshman applications earn less than $35,000 a year. 95%+ make less than $55,000 a year. For most this is their first job. They are largely Humanities/Liberal Arts majors and they are pretty young.
What kind of applicant are these kids more likely to relate to? and how will that affect how they view an application and an applicant. Just because they graduated from a super elite school, does not mean they identify with a legacy applicant applying to the same school.
We are having a national conversation right now about how police officers can’t identify or empathize with the residents of the minority neighborhoods they patrol and how residents of those neighborhoods can’t identify or empathize with the police officers.
The political party conventions highlight this issue even more. Common life experiences make us understand and empathize with each other more. Lack of such experiences make it harder for us to relate with those who are different from us.
Admin counselors are no different. They are also humans. And they bring their human frailties and biases to the job of reading an application. This is not a question of being jealous or mean spirited. It is a question of being able to relate with an applicant in less than 15 minutes.
There is a greater chance that an Assistant Director or Director or Dean of admissions will relate better with the life experiences of a legacy applicant than the entry level Admissions counselor. So a legacy applicant’s fate may also depend on who sees his/her file initially and how involved senior admissions officers are in making legacy application decisions.
This may partly explain why the fate of legacies varies by institution
Sorry, I was looking for your source and this thread is about elites. What applies to Anywhere State or the vast bulk of colleges out there may not apply to the elites, whose mission is different. It would be like saying, grades are all the matters because at most colleges, that’s how it is. I don’t think you should assume these folks can’t be bright, focused on the mission of the college, aim to do their job properly and well. Or that they are underpaid, inexperienced. Elites.
If the argument is human nature, maybe you would have liked an old thread that claimed if an adcom didn’t like your area football team, your chances were sunk. Or the local pizza.
It’s entirely possible to relate to others who are different, come from different circumstances, nations, have a different major even if it involves classes you hated. That’s what professionalism is about.
Are there biases? Yes. And adcom’s are pretty blunt about their biases. If their application instruction asks for recommendations from two teachers who have taught you in an academic subject, don’t send 10, including your middle school choir director, your pastor, and the gym teacher who thinks you have a great attitude (yes, I’ve seen these applications). If the school “recommends” four years of a foreign language in HS and four years of math, social studies and English, don’t be shocked when your “I did it my way” child who substituted yearbook for English and an elective in jazz composition for social studies gets rejected. If the school asks for three subject tests, one of which needs to be math and a science if you are applying for engineering, that’s what their bias is.
Etc.
I think it’s crazy to unpack the psychological orientation of every adcom in America. If the process were so arbitrary, Dartmouth would be filled with stupid kids who like to ski and Brown would be filled with stupid kids who like to draw and are busy protesting the microagression of the day. And neither of these is the case. Both Brown and Dartmouth look for strong academic stats and then “round out” the class with a variety of kids interested in “other”.
I know some adcom’s. They are not 23 year old kids who get to run roughshod over a 200+ year educational institution. They are heavily supervised and mentored by the grownups who take their institutional obligations very, very seriously. Nobody is getting discriminated against because he’s a legacy, and nobody is getting discriminated against because her parents are billionaires and the adcom who does the first reading makes 50K per year.
But if either of these kids is a jerk- and it comes out loud and clear in the application- then yes, call foul when your kid is rejected for being a jerk.
Anyway, a legacy kid can fail to meet the standards, but the ones who have the full picture are a step ahead. (Any kid who “gets it” starts a step ahead.)
Funny how this topic always sways between insistence it’s some sort of conspiracy, the rich promoting insider wealth and connections or the incompetent dismissing the wealthy based on their own insecurities.
It’s not, “Oh, poor me, not rich enough, not poor enough, not minority enough, etc.” The burden is on the applicant to show himself worthy. Know what that means, for your targets. Don’t always be blaming the other guys.
“There is persistent folklore from inside the Harvard and Yale admissions departments that there is no meaningful difference between their acceptance rate for their own legacies and their acceptance rate for the other’s and Princeton’s legacies.”
If this could be proven after study, then this would pretty much refute the idea that there is any legacy boost at HYP. But as always, you must put a YUGE discount on anecdotal evidence. Even from the anecdotal evidence of the HYP adcoms. That’s just another water cooler or CC forum discussion. As you say, “folklore.”
Hurwitz (from Harvard) and Espenshade (from Princeton) both studied the issue in detail and concluded legacy policies are much than a “feather on the scale”. I’d like to hear from anyone who has read those studies why you think those studies are in error. Anyone aware of studies which conclude that the legacy boost is non-existent or smaller than thought?
Without that, denial of the legacy boost strikes me as (i) a conclusion based on inadequate sample size and statistical study or (ii) the Lady doth protest too much.
FYI, here’s the likely list of schools that were in the Hurwitz study. Hurwitz was given access to 133,000 actual application files to those schools. That goes well beyond “folklore.”
Aren’t these legacy applications flagged as they come into the admissions office? I forget which schools say that they give these applicants an additional look but I believe there are several elites that do. Brown even offers alumni and their children a counseling service through their alumni relations office to assist them in building their application. That would suggest that there would be a favorable bias toward these applications.
One of my kids took advantage of the Brown counseling service. It was an hour long meeting where my kid reported that 55 minutes of it were spent describing a wide range of colleges which were NOT Brown, and all the wonderful things that go on at those colleges. The five minutes left were spent discussing the best way to “show us who you are” via the essay.
Kid did not apply to Brown so I cannot comment on whether or not the “flagging” would have been meaningful. But kid and the counselor quickly ascertained that Brown was not what said kid was looking for so they used the time “productively”. After a few discussions with classmates who also used this service, I concluded that my kids experience is not unique. The counselor was very savvy about “hidden gem” type colleges and did not spend the time either pushing Brown or coaching kids on how to get into Brown.
