As has been said multiple times on this forum, there is no point in having a discussion if one cannot distinguish between “I want to ensure we have enough Martians” and “I’m looking to actively keep the number of Venetians down.”
Yes. Arguments made by the opposing side are all devious with hidden meanings and agendas. Arguments made by my side that I approve of are always clean, full of merit and pristine. The other side is overly concerned with prestige, humiliation and what not. I on the other hand…
Must remember this debate tactic 
And I particularly love the “If you don’t like XXXX college don’t apply” argument. Completely floored me and carried the day. Similar to “If you don’t like America”, just leave will you? or better still, don’t even bother coming here. Nobody is stopping you. We don’t want you anyway. You cry baby you.
Must remember this debate tactic too
Oh, and btw, a parent who is super concerned about humiliation and prestige will telegraph their child’s application to the entire world first and then hang their head in shame when their kid does not get in or run around bragging about their kid if they do get in. That is the way such a parent would obviously act ;
And weren’t we talking about legacy? Why are we diverting to race?
What prevents a private college from either seeking to increase the number of legacies it accepts, or cap them at x%? If an increase in legacies causes their stats to lower, then it will be a less desirable school and the free market will “penalize” that choice. You’re just bummed that legacies have the same goods. At least with athletes, you can make a case that the jocks pull the averages down a bit.
Notre Dame is a thick-with-legacies school. They have an incredible alumni network, and once one leaves the bubble of NYC, strong brand power. What’s wrong with that? That’s how they choose to run their school.
If you want to know my opinion, just ask a few on this forum. They seem to have some awesome insights into what I am really thinking. They seem to know me better than I know myself and have even stated that here 
And there is no way to tell whether a college is a “I want to ensure” college or a “I am looking to actively keep” college because the college holds all the data and doesn’t want to release any of it. So both sides are just arguing without real data, but one side is also arguing that such data should not be available, because … you know people are not smart enough to correctly interpret data.
Private colleges have great discretion in deciding who to admit. Athletes, URMs, legacies, developmental cases, kids targeting under-subscribed majors, kids who will play in the school band, geographic diversity, gender balance, etc etc. etc. I have no problem with any of that.
Just trying to point out that the legacy boost does exist and (based on some rigorous studies of thousands of actual applications) is bigger than many (including the schools) suggest.
Under current law, private colleges can easily use race in admissions. Based on this year’s SCOTUS decision in Fisher 2, public colleges can also use race within certain parameters. But state voters or legislatures can also ban that. Michigan and California, for example, both ban the use of race and gender in public college admissions.
"And there is no way to tell whether a college is a “I want to ensure” college or a “I am looking to actively keep” college because the college holds all the data and doesn’t want to release any of it. "
Well, it certainly can’t be Asians - who at my (white) kids’ elite schools made up, oh probably 25% of Kid A’s school and 33% at Kid B’s. Indeed, for Kid A, in the vast majority of pictures he’s taken in college, he’s the only white kid surrounded by a sea of Asian faces, all working and playing and laughing together as it should be. So who do you think they are trying to explicitly limit? Spit it out already.
How about a college tells me “XX% of legacies” applied during “ED or RD” round. We admitted “AA%” of those who applied. Also, here is the SES of legacy applicants, legacy admits and legacy enrolees. Would you like some other information before you spend a fortune sending your child to our school? Here is our data driven website. Have at it. Slice and dice the data in every way you want
I can look at that data and decide whether I want to apply to this college or not. Then if I raise the foul play card, the college can just laugh and show me the data, instead of just saying. Hey trust me, we are good, and if you don’t believe us, well then, don’t apply!!
I wonder why some folks are fighting “more” open disclosure.
Why do YOU think some folks are “fighting” (or just not interested in) more open disclosure?
I for one think it’s silly to ever think one has a chance that’s appreciably different from whatever the stated admissions rate is. My kid was a double legacy. We told him it was a feather on the scale and be prepared to be rejected like the vast majority of legacies. I don’t know why one would ever argue otherwise.
But CC is full of people who can’t handle uncertainty.
I didn’t “guess you must be an XXX.” Reread my post. Nice try. I don’t know nor do I care.
But it would be helpful if you would just spit out already who you think is being discriminated against and why. Hopefully you’ll come up with something novel versus what has been discussed on CC for ages.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Please don’t drift into a discussion of AA. There is ONE thread on CC devoted to that subject.
VeryLuckyParent, just how much have you really done the work to learn what the competitive colleges look for? Because the pieces are there. Many of us did it and are satisfied with what we learned.
Meantime, just showing anger and throwing shade at what one doesn’t know, hasn’t looked into, just repeating that you smell a rat, you know there’s a rat, and if they don’t come hand you the info, they are rats, doesn’t help a conversation.
I stand by my belief many legacies can do a better job on the app. Not all. It’s not all about stats and a couple of hs clubs or fundraisers. It’s about how a kid can think and put the pieces together. You wanna be Harvard, then think at the Harvard level, have the energies.
You got me there. I have done no work at all. I know next to nothing about competitive colleges. I don’t know anything about the IPEDS data or the CDS data or even the differences between the two data sets, or the Govt data on college affordability. All I know is the USNews rankings and am actually quite clueless. And now I know how much I have to learn, because if “Many of us” are satisfied with what “we” have learned, then who am I to say “I need more information” That is so elitist and whiny or maybe I have a hidden agenda or bias that I can’t even recognize myself
I also stand by my belief that knowing what percent of legacies or athletes, stem kids or violinists were admitted from an applicant pool is not the criteria on which you select target colleges. That’s the stuff for Chances threads, not the meat of why that college is a good match for you and you for it. And if you can’t figure out what attributes make you a match, maybe you aren’t one.
Just because a kid gets top grades and is the big dawg in his one hs, doesn’t mean he can think on the level that college expects to see. Kids say all sorts of things in their apps, that show their scope is high school and only high school. But you aren’t applying to transfer high schools (here I am, I met the minimums, take me.) This is about the leap to college and we started with reference to some of the most competitive out there.
Not all legacies have the extra omph. Some of them on CC spend a lot of energy trying to figure out whether legacy will help them overcome some weakness, wave a magic wand over their heads. They miss the point
I’m sorry OP came here, needing to get through some confusion and mixed emotions, then the thread got out of hand. I should have said earlier that I, too, think UCLA is a win.
Hoo boy. Well, to try to get this back on a sensible track, I have a couple of comments. First of all, even if legacy advantage is real, it’s not that huge. The elite colleges reject a majority of legacy admits, and those of us who have been on CC for a while have seen numerous kids rejected by the legacy school who were nevertheless admitted by peer schools. Second, as has been pointed out, the advantage of legacy applicants may be partly causation, and partly correlation. Finally, the degree of legacy advantage could vary substantially from school to school (and over time at the same school), so a study of the aggregate legacy advantage over a number of unidentified schools is not very helpful to an individual student.
To me, the most useful takeaway from this is that if you are a legacy, it might be worthwhile to take a good look at that school, and to apply early if you really like it.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Please keep on topic, or the thread will be closed.
The Hurwitz study is interesting, although I think it is being significantly over-read here. A few comments:
- Hurwitz was looking at data from 30 colleges and universities, all of which are relatively prestigious and selective, but (as he acknowledges) which differ significantly in just how selective they are. He does purport to control for that, but it wasn't clear to me just how he did that.
- He started out with 133,000 unique applicants, but only 62,000 of them submitted applications to more than one of the 30 participating institutions, and they submitted about 223,000 applications to those institutions. For reasons I didn't quite follow, however, some of the data includes some of the data includes single-institution RD applicants, so that about 294,000 applications were reflected in the study. Out of all those applications, only 5,258, less than 2%, were from "primary" legacies (children of undergraduate alumni), and that seems to include applications where there was only a single application. It will also include some number of multiple legacy applications from the same applicant (since most applicants have two parents, and sometimes both parents went to different colleges in the 30-college set).
So it’s not really a study of 133,000 applicants; it’s really a study of 5,000 or fewer applicants across 30 institutions of varying characteristics. The number of legacy applications for any one institution looks likely to be in the low-mid-hundreds at most. That’s still pretty good, and it’s comprehensive for one year. But for some of the figures, as the analysis gets refined, the standard deviations are pretty large. And, as the paper acknowledges, only sometimes controls for, the dynamics of Trinity College’s practices with regard to legacies are likely very different from those of Harvard.
- One thing I didn't see in the paper: what was the raw primary legacy admission rate? The foregoing analysis suggests that it's very, very high. For example: We know that Harvard had about 230 legacies (15%) in its 2007 entering class, and we can infer (based on Harvard's high yield), that it didn't accept more than about 250 legacies. If it only got 400, 500, even 600 legacy applications, that's a very high admission rate. Much higher than I've ever seen suggested.
- What I referred to as "folklore" from the Harvard and Yale admissions offices was admissions officers talking about numbers that were tracked year-to-year in internal reports. I.e., actual data, reported second hand.
- That data is not necessarily inconsistent with the Hurwitz paper, for a reason I hadn't thought of previously. While, say, the set of Yale legacy applicants to Yale may be stronger in terms of academic statistics than average applicants to Yale, it is entirely possible that the set of Harvard legacy applicants to Yale is even stronger still, since they are applying without any expectation of favoritism. Saying that Yale accepts Yale legacies and Harvard legacies at the same rate doesn't mean there is no preference for Yale legacies unless you think the two groups of applicants are fundamentally interchangeable, and quite possibly they aren't.
- What I couldn't figure out, and what seems to fly in the face of real life as I have observed it: Does the study really say that a legacy RD applicant to a most-selective-tier university has a 15x greater chance of being accepted to that university than to an equivalent non-legacy university, also RD? That would be very powerful, and extremely surprising to me, because my lived experience is completely different. Maybe it does say that, but I don't think it quite gets there.
I think colleges can disclose more but they choose not to for two reasons. One they don’t want to. They run their schools based on the best interests of their own. If disclosing more is not helpful to further their public image or is not out of necessity, they just get away with it. I think sometimes we forget that they don’t have and they never even try to assume the obligation of being “fair” to everyone who wants to join their communities. Application and admission is a two way interaction. Just as an individual is free to apply, reject an offer or withdraw later, colleges can reject, accept or expell as long as both sides are acting legally.
The second reason is that they don’t believe disclosing more about their admission process will help ease the public outcry. What if there are preferences, which I think there might be? Are you asking them to disclose data that support the “allegations” against them? What if they don’t think there are preferences, which I think there’s a chance they think so? Then the nature of holistic admission makes it almost impossible for outsiders to make sense of the metrics they look at by aggregated data. You need to go to each individual’s file to find out how and why one is admitted or rejected. And even if there’s a clear “mistake”, there’s still the question whether it’s an honest human error or a systematic discrimination. Not a mission impossible but pretty close.
I wish someone had given this piece of sage advice to Edward Frenkel when he was pursuing his college dreams.
Meant to say discrimination where I said preference…