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> Not wealthy donors Harvard's admission rate is <6% for general population - that includes affirmative action ethnicities. Harvards admission rate is >30% for
by MagnumOpus 6y ago
> Not wealthy donors
Harvard's admission rate is <6% for general population - that includes affirmative action ethnicities. Harvards admission rate is >30% for "legacies" which make up one in six of their students, and even higher for donors. These are the kids who get in while being thick as a brick. The injustice is not primarily the black kid with 1400 SAT getting in over the east Asian kid with 1580 -- the injustice is the hundreds of CEOs/senators' kids being assured admission even being dumber than a sack of hammers.
- phonon 6y ago25th percentile for Harvard SAT scores is 1460...so there is a limit for how many dumb as a brick legacies matriculate :-)
- jmalicki 6y ago1 in 6 is only the 17th percentile, so many of them may be well under that score.
- retortio 6y agoI would expect legacies to have a higher admission rate. They are a subpopulation coming from homes with intelligent parents, likely grew up in intellectually stimulating environments, and were probably focused on the Ivy League before many of their peers had even heard that term. There is definitely some application boost legacies get simply by virtue of being a legacy, but their applications are probably quite strong in general. So it's unlikely that dropping the SAT was meant to cater to them.
- evanpw 6y agoThis should be easy to test, right? Look at the percentage of students admitted to Harvard whose parents went to Harvard vs. the percentage admitted whose parents went to some other similarly-selective school.