<p>I can only share my personal experiences regarding the college admissions process. Unfortunately, I don’t think my anecdotal info will be that helpful to the OP. The only thing it proves is that it is possible for an applicant to secure an acceptance from both universities in question. Harvard and Stanford are both highly selective schools with less than 10% acceptance rates. Both look for an applicant who has strong academic credentials, excellent test scores, a strong enthusiasm for learning, dedication to community service, and leadership potential.</p>
<p>I was a California state resident at the time of applying to college. I was valedictorian at a modestly-sized rural high school (graduating class of 260) that probably wasn’t even on the radar of the more competitive colleges in the U.S. My SAT score was 1510 on the old 1600 scale. (Bear in mind that the SAT scoring scale was re-centered a few years later in 1995, which essentially added approx. 100 points to most students’ scores.) I was fortunate enough to get in everywhere I applied: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Cal Tech, MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.</p>
<p>After reading this thread, I have to say that, unless participants also serve on adcoms for the schools being discussed, there is a ridiculous amount of wild speculation regarding the admission chances for legacy applicants. Typically, adcoms don’t release that sort of info to the public. When I was at Harvard, I knew a handful of legacies (defined as having one or both parents who graduated from Harvard). Some did great in their classes (clearly academically qualified), whereas others took “guts” (easy courses) and were still curve fodder. The vast majority of the legacies that I knew attended elite prep schools on the East Coast. I guess that’s not so surprising.</p>