@PetraMC, As far as I can tell, this was a misreading of the Harvard incoming student survey. The 36% is for students with any familial relationship to Harvard, not just those normally considered for legacy status. IOW, if your third cousin or great great great grandfather attended Harvard you were included in the 36%. It’s still not a small number, but the % of students with one or both parents who attended was 14.5%. 4.9% had one or more grandparents who attended, and 7.2% had a sibling.
I also wonder if Harvard messed up in reporting this since many of the categories must have overlapped (e.g., a student with both a parent and a sibling who attended) and instead they all neatly add up to 100%.
And, as we have already discovered, making sweeping generalizations about legacy policies and who, where and what practice is “not identical” with the others is a fraught venture. Unfortunately, it would appear that legacy admissions are a closely held statistic at the majority of Ivies. Of the Ancient Eight, I could only find four that were willing to discuss legacy admits in either their end-of-the-admissions-cycle school paper coverage or on their official websites:
The other wrinkle is trying to determine whether the rates are for matriculated or merely admitted students. It isn’t always clear. For Wesleyan, I am including both percentages"
@Sue22 That’s what I meant by “extended” but I should have been more clear, sorry. I’m not sure why Harvard provides this information (family connection stats beyond what is officially considered “legacy”) but I wouldn’t be surprised if other schools were similar if they decided to disclose. Does that family connection give an applicant a bump? Who knows.
You are right that there would be lots of overlaps.
Yes, “could” @MWolf? The implication over more than one post seems to suggest that as a group, legacies are less qualified than non-legacies. There is no evidence for this, if that’s the contention.
Thank you to the poster who corrected on the over-reporting/over-interpretation earlier on the percentage of legacy admits overall vs. ED as a segment.
If a legacy is applying ED **and is not a big donor/b, and is also not a recruited athlete, URM, or celebrity, the student is almost sure to be ultra-qualified - i.e., superior to what is typically seen in the RD round at that particular college.
For Yale, at least in recent years, when a legacy applies, the alum gets a polite letter from the admissions office saying, in effect, “we noticed this application came in, we’re paying attention, but be aware that we admit about 20% of legacy applicants these days, and there’s no appeal”.
At Yale, legacies usually comprise somewhere between 10-15% of the matriculated class (11% in the class of 2022: https://admissions.yale.edu/sites/default/files/class_profile_2022_fall.pdf). Assuming 90-95% of admitted legacies accept their offers, that means a bit over a thousand legacies apply every year (out of over 35,000 total applicants), on average a little more than 200 are admitted (out of around 2,000 total admits) and around 200 show up as part of the total matriculated class of around 1,550.
If “qualified” is taken to mean “stats”, what the evidence produced in the Harvard case seems to suggest (if I can roughly summarize) is that admitted legacies tend to cluster in the middle of the class stats-wise (with very few at the bottom reaches), “less qualified”, at least by the measure of stats. That said, many kids with higher stats than many admitted legacies are denied. The experts on this are @Data10 and @SatchelSF.
Every admit gets their offer for a unique set of reasons based on everything they bring to the party (brains, leadership potential, talents, athletic ability, other accomplishments), and the value of the family to the institution matters. So long as an applicant meets the minimum academic baseline, the admissions office looks at the whole package and asks itself, “which 2,000 or so kids do we want to offer spots”, for all kinds of reasons.
@DeepBlue86 “Qualified” is not a term which prioritizes stats above other features of the application, for the vast majority of private colleges. Stats are merely an overall baseline which some posters may be fascinated by, but their fascination is not shared by most admissions committees. A student who is “in the middle of the pack” stat-wise, for a high-level university, but is superior in other accomplishment to other applicants is in fact not in the middle of the pack but is among the probably ultra-qualified.
A love affair with statistics does not make one “an expert.” by the way.
In a class almost exactly the same size as Walter Payton, Phillips Exeter (the school you used as a contrast) has over twice as many National Merit Scholars and higher average ACTs than Payton, and they performed better on the AP’s. Exeter offers three levels of courses above AP’s (400-AP exam or first year college) - 500’s first or second year college level, 600’s and 700’s college major level, and 999’s independent field courses or tutorials. What awards are Payton kids winning that Exeter kids aren’t?
IMSA and Exeters’ standardized test scores are pretty much a wash. (IMSA-V 714, M 749, ACT 32.1. PE- V 730, M 740, ACT 31-32. Without knowing how many kids from each school are interested in attending an Ivy League school we’re not left with much information as to whether Exeter has a pipeline, has students with stronger applications, or just has more students with an interest in these colleges.
Over 2/3 of last year’s graduating class at IMSA was accepted to UIUC, meaning that a huge number of kids apply there. It’s very possible that a lot of kids know that’s the best school within their budget. It’s also possible that the best kids at each school prefer to attend college closer to home.
Ironically, IMSA doesn’t supply colleges with GPAs or class averages while Exeter does supply student GPAs. IMSA only requires 2 years of a language and 3 of English which I would imagine would hurt their applicants at many non-tech. schools.
One big advantage kids in prep schools anywhere in the country enjoy is that they’ve already gone through a competitive admissions process very much like the college admissions process. Those who have been successful in getting into prep school have already demonstrated those traits colleges look for in applicants- strong grades, high test scores, glowing recommendations, the ability to do more than just academics, and the ability to write reflectively about themselves.
I’ll also add that prep school kids tend to have already developed excellent time management skills because in addition to their academic load they all have to do afternoon sports, running from the end of the academic day until 5:30 or 6 in the evening. Just like their public school counterparts they also participate in community service, extracurriculars, clubs, and outside interests. One thing they don’t have is part-time jobs during the school year.
I accidentally deleted some words when I edited my post - what I originally had said was “so are not “less qualified”, at least by the measure of stats”. Stats are one factor among many, and I believe many people set too much store by them, so I think we sort-of agree. That said, I think that, practically speaking, “qualified” means “whatever the university wants”, so, if someone’s admitted, they’re prima facie ultra-qualified.
The two posters I named are far more diligent and practiced at parsing the data than I am (and, I imagine, than the vast majority of people on here), and I’ve learned a lot from them. That isn’t the same as saying I agree with everything they write, though.
The non-hooked IMSA applicants who are not constrained by financial concerns probably are about as successful in getting in to Ivies/equivalents as non-hooked applicants (who don’t have financial concerns) from the top prep schools (prep schools, of course, would have a ton more hooked applicants).
The SES composition of the schools would be very different. IMSA would have good representation or every tier from poor to upper-middle-class and a mix of urban, rural, and suburban. Almost no kid from a family that is rich enough not to work. Top prep schools would have quite an overrepresentation of those types of families.
Glowing recommendations may tell you more about the GC or teacher writing the recommendation than the student. At large, public high schools, the GCs probably couldn’t remember the names of most of their students. Both teachers and GCs at public high schools may be less likely to know how to write a good LOR for elite college admissions.
My point was that kids who get into high schools where recommendations are required are likely to be the kind of kids who get good college recommendations. For instance if you’re spectacularly smart but cocky or otherwise unlikeable you’re less likely to get into a high school which requires a LOR from your middle school teacher. The prep schools have already done a first sifting using for the most part the same criteria as the elite colleges. Competitive exam schools and GT programs usually do a partial sifting; they’ve selected kids on the basis of academics and raw intellectual ability but not by special talents such as athletic prowess or the ability to present oneself well in an interview, which can be an important tiebreaker at a place like Wesleyan.
I agree that kids at schools where they’re well known, for instance places where their math teacher is also their soccer coach or their English teacher is also their dorm parent, and the college counselors have fewer kids, are more likely to get thoughtful recommendations than kids with overworked GC’s.
The Chicago magnet schools seem to use as criteria grades, test scores, and SES.
IMSA does not look at athletic ability but looks at a lot of the same parts of an application package the elite privates look at (so grades and test scores but also teacher recs, ECs, and essay), then fills out its class with an eye towards geographic and racial representation. Not sure about now, but in the past, the scuttlebutt was that half the class would be filled out based purely on academic merit and then IMSA would fill out the rest of the class to meet institutional needs, as colleges would put it.
In the past, there were some interviews too.
BTW, many of the private elites do favor top public school kids from cities where they own real estate (and both NU and the U of C have substantial real estate in Chicago). Look at the Harvard acceptance numbers for Boston Latin:
There are significant differences among schools. Education correlates with more test scores. The well-respected study on “the hidden curriculum of work,” linked above, tracked the differences among class-based school curriculums. Truly elite high schools emphasize problem solving in ways that state-mandated, work-prep curriculums don’t.
I don’t believe that elite colleges are indifferent to the “hidden curriculum of work.” They are balancing preparation with ability. Even so, when there are such differences among curriculum, it is no surprise that acceptances seem arbitrary. How does one compare an accuracy based curriculum with a creativity based or problem solving one?
Given the quality of our local public schools and state tests, my children went to private school because I wanted them to be adept at more than tests.
^ And that is why magnet schools are so critical. To affluent suburbanites, frankly, a school like IMSA isn’t needed, but to clever lower-SES rural/small town kids who are bored out of their minds and hate the environment they are in (because they don’t fit in at all), IMSA is a lifesaver, opening up worlds, opportunities, ideas, and challenges that they never considered or didn’t know existed.
The HS I would have otherwise gone to offered 2 foreign languages and 3 years of science education total. 1 year each of biology, chemistry, and physics.
There is a pre-selection, similar to elite colleges, but not exactly in the way you describe. I’ve only met one person who applied to a BS. Most of the people who apply to boarding school at all will come from high SES families, clustered in the NE. Then, the selective BS admit a certain percentage of legacies. To mirror image what I said previously, the LOR from the middle school teacher for BS may tell you more about the middle school teacher than the student. As for cocky, the one person I know who went to BS hated it because there were too many, cocky, arrogant, rich kids.
@roethlisburger, probably not much. Boston Latin is a Boston public and Harvard faculty tend to live in the suburbs. Plus (like Stuy), many of the BLS Harvard kids are first-generation immigrants.
Shocking that kids who live in Illinois are most interested in colleges in Illinois while kids in the northeast are most interested in schools in the northeast.
I’m not disagreeing with your point that the elite private high schools in the northeast have strong connections to the Ivies. But the elite students in the northeast in general have a much stronger attraction to the Ivies and less interest in the area state schools than elite students in the rest of the country. The attitude in the northeast is that if you can’t get into an elite school (Ivy or other), that you are slumming it if you end up at a UMass, Rutgers, SUNY, etc. The attitude in the Midwest and elsewhere is that the flagship state schools are the goal, such as Michigan, UIUC, Texas, etc. Yes, top students from around the country apply to the Ivies, but it’s not pounded into them that those are the end-all be-all like it is in the northeast.