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The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students. "Among the admitted legacies, grades a

The article doesn't mention the grades and test scores of legacy students are as strong as non-legacy admitted students. "Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430. Once on campus, legacy students tended to have slightly higher college grades, but their involvement in campus activities, merit awards, academic recognition and on-time graduation rates were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. In sum, legacy students, on average, were about as academically strong as non-legacy students, neither superior nor inferior." https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-cant-give-up-legacy-admissions/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-why-elite-colleges-...

tchaffee 3y ago
Sounds like a good reason to eliminate legacy admissions if the claim is that these students can compete without the crutch.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  "legacy admissions" don't exist as an official thing, it's not like any school explicitly states how many legacy students it will admit. It's a term to address the phenomenon of those related to alumni being more frequently admitted
  - detaro 3y ago
    Places like Harvard do have explicit policies to give such students advantages, so no, it's very much an official thing.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    They have "college attended" for each parent on the first page of the PDF application form. Removing that would be easy.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    It totally is an official thing or was when I applied. Statistics on legacy vs non-legacy admission rates and how legacy status was factored (the nature of the advantage you got varied by school) in were readily available when I was applying to schools.
- leetcrew 3y ago
  I think the argument is the opposite... they start with one or more orders of magnitude of qualified applicants in excess of capacity. and to meet DEI goals, only X% of those accepted can be white anyway. how they actually pick from the qualified applicant pool is fairly arbitrary to begin with. so as long as whatever on-campus KPIs they track for the legacy-admit population are the same, why does it really matter? I was not personally a legacy admit to my college (so no skin in the game really), but fwiw I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate thing to select for. most schools have their own distinct culture and consider that an important thing to preserve. I imagine families that try to send their children to a specific school over multiple generations probably feel a stronger connection to that school than the typical graduate, so putting a thumb on the scale to help them seems like an approach that could work. if anything, I'm more upset about how recruiting for college sports works.
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    So these schools have goals to increase diversity but they want to preserve their culture? Those are competing goals. Eliminating legacy admissions would be a lasting increase in diversity.
    - leetcrew 3y ago
      I don't see those two as mutually exclusive, prima facie, unless you see "culture" as a euphemism for "perpetuating white supremacy". it certainly can be, but it can also be things like haverford's honor code, which only works when a critical mass of students find it meaningful. or it can be totally innocuous traditions like u chicago's annual scavenger hunt. elite schools can accept being each other's close competitors, but they can't accept being indistinguishable substitutes for their +/- 1 peers on the us news leaderboard.
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        Legacy admissions have a close to zero chance of increasing diversity. The entire point is that people who are just like former students get preference. By definition it's the opposite of a program to seek out those who have a different life experience than the status quo.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
This is an important point. I do agree wealth and access to privileged resources are too concentrated, but it's silly to assume that the child of two Harvard graduates, due to education, genetics and preference, wouldn't be a better candidate for Harvard than a random person
polygamous_bat 3y ago
I can pretty confidently tell you that for every student admitted to Harvard with 1430 SAT there are at least 10 more students out there who were rejected with at least as much score. SAT score and grades are merely a necessary condition to get in, but they haven't been sufficient in a very long time. As for grades, check out https://www.thecrimson.com/flyby/article/2013/12/5/the-harvard-grade-generator/ https://www.thecrimson.com/flyby/article/2013/12/5/the-harva... but in summary, the most common grade in Harvard is A, so don't think the data point says much.
CHSbeachbum420 3y ago
Of course the legacy student test well, they have had access to amazing resources their entire lives. This isn't about test scores, it's about the opportunity for lower class advancement rather than perpetuating existing wealth
e1g 3y ago
The original study does address whether ALDC applicants are "as good" as typical applicants - > Overall, our results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they had been treated as a typical applicant. And on athletes - > Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip
- unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
  But the article doesn't deal with whether recruited athletes as a category are diverse. Probably, they are diverse and these statistics mean something remarkably different from the knee-jerk narrative in the article and many comments here.
  - kemayo 3y ago
    Article doesn't, but the study it's based on does. Recruited athletes are less-diverse than the general applicant pool: > For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories. - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w26316.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... page 16 My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.
    - thrill 3y ago
      "For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white" 75% of the US population is white, so it sounds like that group is underrepresented in athletic admissions. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222
pknomad 3y ago
I don't feel like that's too surprising. There is that saying "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." It reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqi_6v2RGB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqi_6v2RGB0 Essentially a high school student (now a college student @ MIT) solved a conjecture on distribution of Carmichael numbers. The parents of the high school student also happens to be first rate mathematicians. I went to a southern ivy and many of the legacy students that I've met were children of doctors, lawyers, business executives, etc and grew up in a very fostering environment where they were exposed to how to behave in such an environment. I don't think it's too surprising that children would also excel like their parents.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  There's not what's happening. What's happening is (made up numbers, relative proportion a true) 1000 ALDC students qualify. 200 admit. 1000 non-ALDC students qualify, with equivalent resumes. 50 admit. Thus it's easier to get in at ALDC, all else equal, and les qualified ALDC displace "overqualified" non-ALDC, or if you believe their qualifications are truly equal and those 2000 students can't be compared to each other, ALDC get loaded dice for the random selection.
  - pknomad 3y ago
    What's ALDC? (a quick google search gets me Abby Lee Dance company which I presume is incorrect)
    - deely3 3y ago
      From other comment: [A]thlete, [L]egacy, [D]ean's interest list (i.e children of big donors), [C]hildren of faculty and staff
raincom 3y ago
"On average, LDC applicants (that is, excluding athletes) are stronger than typical applicants. However, the average LDC admit is weaker than the average typical admit, suggesting an admissions advantage for LDC applicants." (p.3 of http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf )
dirtyid 3y ago
>indistinguishable from non-legacy students. If you break down non-legacy cohorts where Asian applicants have to score 50-100 points higher, then academic performance of both legacy and non-legacy (average dragged down by AA) is artificially low.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
Whats the distribution look like though? I can generate you two datasets that have the same average but different distributions to the point that a small minority of one dataset would qualify for admission if they were combined.

tchaffee 3y ago

Sounds like a good reason to eliminate legacy admissions if the claim is that these students can compete without the crutch.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
"legacy admissions" don't exist as an official thing, it's not like any school explicitly states how many legacy students it will admit. It's a term to address the phenomenon of those related to alumni being more frequently admitted
- detaro 3y ago
  Places like Harvard do have explicit policies to give such students advantages, so no, it's very much an official thing.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  They have "college attended" for each parent on the first page of the PDF application form. Removing that would be easy.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  It totally is an official thing or was when I applied. Statistics on legacy vs non-legacy admission rates and how legacy status was factored (the nature of the advantage you got varied by school) in were readily available when I was applying to schools.
leetcrew 3y ago
I think the argument is the opposite... they start with one or more orders of magnitude of qualified applicants in excess of capacity. and to meet DEI goals, only X% of those accepted can be white anyway. how they actually pick from the qualified applicant pool is fairly arbitrary to begin with. so as long as whatever on-campus KPIs they track for the legacy-admit population are the same, why does it really matter? I was not personally a legacy admit to my college (so no skin in the game really), but fwiw I don't think it's an entirely illegitimate thing to select for. most schools have their own distinct culture and consider that an important thing to preserve. I imagine families that try to send their children to a specific school over multiple generations probably feel a stronger connection to that school than the typical graduate, so putting a thumb on the scale to help them seems like an approach that could work. if anything, I'm more upset about how recruiting for college sports works.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  So these schools have goals to increase diversity but they want to preserve their culture? Those are competing goals. Eliminating legacy admissions would be a lasting increase in diversity.
  - leetcrew 3y ago
    I don't see those two as mutually exclusive, prima facie, unless you see "culture" as a euphemism for "perpetuating white supremacy". it certainly can be, but it can also be things like haverford's honor code, which only works when a critical mass of students find it meaningful. or it can be totally innocuous traditions like u chicago's annual scavenger hunt. elite schools can accept being each other's close competitors, but they can't accept being indistinguishable substitutes for their +/- 1 peers on the us news leaderboard.
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      Legacy admissions have a close to zero chance of increasing diversity. The entire point is that people who are just like former students get preference. By definition it's the opposite of a program to seek out those who have a different life experience than the status quo.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

This is an important point. I do agree wealth and access to privileged resources are too concentrated, but it's silly to assume that the child of two Harvard graduates, due to education, genetics and preference, wouldn't be a better candidate for Harvard than a random person

polygamous_bat 3y ago

I can pretty confidently tell you that for every student admitted to Harvard with 1430 SAT there are at least 10 more students out there who were rejected with at least as much score. SAT score and grades are merely a necessary condition to get in, but they haven't been sufficient in a very long time. As for grades, check out https://www.thecrimson.com/flyby/article/2013/12/5/the-harvard-grade-generator/ https://www.thecrimson.com/flyby/article/2013/12/5/the-harva... but in summary, the most common grade in Harvard is A, so don't think the data point says much.

CHSbeachbum420 3y ago

Of course the legacy student test well, they have had access to amazing resources their entire lives. This isn't about test scores, it's about the opportunity for lower class advancement rather than perpetuating existing wealth

e1g 3y ago

The original study does address whether ALDC applicants are "as good" as typical applicants - > Overall, our results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they had been treated as a typical applicant. And on athletes - > Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
But the article doesn't deal with whether recruited athletes as a category are diverse. Probably, they are diverse and these statistics mean something remarkably different from the knee-jerk narrative in the article and many comments here.
- kemayo 3y ago
  Article doesn't, but the study it's based on does. Recruited athletes are less-diverse than the general applicant pool: > For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories. - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w26316.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... page 16 My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.
  - thrill 3y ago
    "For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white" 75% of the US population is white, so it sounds like that group is underrepresented in athletic admissions. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222

pknomad 3y ago

I don't feel like that's too surprising. There is that saying "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." It reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqi_6v2RGB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqi_6v2RGB0 Essentially a high school student (now a college student @ MIT) solved a conjecture on distribution of Carmichael numbers. The parents of the high school student also happens to be first rate mathematicians. I went to a southern ivy and many of the legacy students that I've met were children of doctors, lawyers, business executives, etc and grew up in a very fostering environment where they were exposed to how to behave in such an environment. I don't think it's too surprising that children would also excel like their parents.

hgsgm 3y ago
There's not what's happening. What's happening is (made up numbers, relative proportion a true) 1000 ALDC students qualify. 200 admit. 1000 non-ALDC students qualify, with equivalent resumes. 50 admit. Thus it's easier to get in at ALDC, all else equal, and les qualified ALDC displace "overqualified" non-ALDC, or if you believe their qualifications are truly equal and those 2000 students can't be compared to each other, ALDC get loaded dice for the random selection.
- pknomad 3y ago
  What's ALDC? (a quick google search gets me Abby Lee Dance company which I presume is incorrect)
  - deely3 3y ago
    From other comment: [A]thlete, [L]egacy, [D]ean's interest list (i.e children of big donors), [C]hildren of faculty and staff

raincom 3y ago

"On average, LDC applicants (that is, excluding athletes) are stronger than typical applicants. However, the average LDC admit is weaker than the average typical admit, suggesting an admissions advantage for LDC applicants." (p.3 of http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf )

dirtyid 3y ago

>indistinguishable from non-legacy students. If you break down non-legacy cohorts where Asian applicants have to score 50-100 points higher, then academic performance of both legacy and non-legacy (average dragged down by AA) is artificially low.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

Whats the distribution look like though? I can generate you two datasets that have the same average but different distributions to the point that a small minority of one dataset would qualify for admission if they were combined.