3 ms·

That doesn't change the incentive for the admissions committee to find a way to admit the left tail of legacies without criticism. If they want to take all the

That doesn't change the incentive for the admissions committee to find a way to admit the left tail of legacies without criticism. If they want to take all the money that's on the table, they have to admit all the kids whose parents they want to incentivize to donate, regardless of their test scores.

onetimeusename 3y ago
I did some math on this with statistics that are available. I was as conservative as I could be. I assumed an SAT score std dev of 240. I used the legacy score of 1523 as the mean. I assumed a normal curve. I took the highest bound on percent of white admitted students who are legacy: 35% (in reality at Harvard it's probably a lot less). I used Harvard's current student body stats:{1984 admitted students and ~40% white}. I found that only 2% of the incoming class would be theoretical white people who were admitted with legacy status and who fell to the left of 1 std dev in SAT score. If these people exist, I don't know what other circumstances might exist for them. Their SAT score is still high by US standards and they may be athletes or overlap with some other category for all I know or something else. I think the below average legacy admit trope is actually deployed as a racial stereotype of white students that the SFFA, who are Asian, are using to gain access to Harvard. I don't think the hypothetical upper bound of 2% which is ~40 students is meaningful. Now there is one issue with this which is that we don't have legacy student SAT scores broken down by race. But other sources suggest legacy students are disproportionately white. This is not true of the student body generally.
- deleted 3y ago
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- civilized 3y ago
  This is a calculation on the distribution of admitted students. It isn't relevant to my point that elite colleges stand to benefit from admitting more legacies regardless of test performance. If anything, if Harvard only admits high-performing legacies today, it only bolsters the case for how much more legacies they could admit with a more opaque, "holistic" process. Which, mind you, is something similar to other things they've done historically.
  - onetimeusename 3y ago
    ya that's valid. I don't think there is a clean answer about who should be admitted but my attempt was just to show that the dumb legacy trope doesn't seem to be completely factual. But yes, children of Harvard alumni probably have an advantage. But then again the legacies may be talented students.

onetimeusename 3y ago

I did some math on this with statistics that are available. I was as conservative as I could be. I assumed an SAT score std dev of 240. I used the legacy score of 1523 as the mean. I assumed a normal curve. I took the highest bound on percent of white admitted students who are legacy: 35% (in reality at Harvard it's probably a lot less). I used Harvard's current student body stats:{1984 admitted students and ~40% white}. I found that only 2% of the incoming class would be theoretical white people who were admitted with legacy status and who fell to the left of 1 std dev in SAT score. If these people exist, I don't know what other circumstances might exist for them. Their SAT score is still high by US standards and they may be athletes or overlap with some other category for all I know or something else. I think the below average legacy admit trope is actually deployed as a racial stereotype of white students that the SFFA, who are Asian, are using to gain access to Harvard. I don't think the hypothetical upper bound of 2% which is ~40 students is meaningful. Now there is one issue with this which is that we don't have legacy student SAT scores broken down by race. But other sources suggest legacy students are disproportionately white. This is not true of the student body generally.

deleted 3y ago
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civilized 3y ago
This is a calculation on the distribution of admitted students. It isn't relevant to my point that elite colleges stand to benefit from admitting more legacies regardless of test performance. If anything, if Harvard only admits high-performing legacies today, it only bolsters the case for how much more legacies they could admit with a more opaque, "holistic" process. Which, mind you, is something similar to other things they've done historically.
- onetimeusename 3y ago
  ya that's valid. I don't think there is a clean answer about who should be admitted but my attempt was just to show that the dumb legacy trope doesn't seem to be completely factual. But yes, children of Harvard alumni probably have an advantage. But then again the legacies may be talented students.