<p>@Hunt, no reason to be so unhappy. There are many highly highly qualified kids at Yale (hard to admit as I attended Princeton, Stanford and Harvard). Maybe Yale doesn’t have a Z-list but I’ll bet it has its equivalent. Most of the candidates I’m talking about are good enough – that is, qualified academically – but benefit from the association with their parents. With so many qualified candidates and a 6% or 10% probability of admission, the association increases the probability of admission. No? Just think linear regression (or logistic regression). If having an elite parent has a positive coefficient when the dependent variable is admission, that means the kid with the parental hook (or athletic or other hook) has a higher probability of getting in than someone who is otherwise identical. It’s like a very light finger on the scale when measuring. Not huge, but there. </p>
<p>No one said that the only hooks were for elite parents. As you know, being a URM is a hook, which is one but only one reason that Yale and its ilk have many more URMs than they did when you were there. Maybe being poor is a hook (at a few schools, I think it is, but at many others probably not). Social engineering by school admissions departments has indeed altered elite school student bodies over time. As a middle class Jewish kid, I was grateful that when I applied they weren’t tipping so hard for aristocratic kids and less hard against Jews. </p>
<p>I am sure I benefitted at each stage from my admission into an elite institution. But, I try to have a little humility about it. I think Michael Lewis’s speech at Princeton really captured things well: <a href=“Princeton Baccalaureate 2012: Michael Lewis - YouTube”>Princeton Baccalaureate 2012: Michael Lewis - YouTube. </p>