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It depends on how much they receive from those legacy families. Just being a "legacy" doesn't entail that one receives a massive boost in admissions. There are

It depends on how much they receive from those legacy families. Just being a "legacy" doesn't entail that one receives a massive boost in admissions. There are a lot of "legacies" out there and they can't all be admitted. The Ivy League legacy whose father sends a $100 check each year only gets a small bump: maybe 50%, or the difference between a 10% vs. 15% chance of admission. It's much more advantageous to come from a brand-name East Coast prep school, which brings the chance of admission, even to Harvard, well north of 50%. Children of five- and six-figure legacy families are auto-admits, but they have so many advantages that this shouldn't surprise anyone. Most people who complain about academically mediocre "legacy admits" at elite schools are describing students who come from such privileged backgrounds that they would be attending elite schools even if legacy admissions were abolished, because of all the other socioeconomic factors in the admissions process.

tokenadult 18y ago
What is the evidence that prep school graduates have a base acceptance rate at Harvard above 50 percent? That's not what the matriculation statistics at Exeter http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Profile_2009_10_7 http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Profile_2009_10_7(2).pdf tend to suggest.
- time_management 18y ago
  Those statistics show where the students actually go, not where they apply and are accepted. Why do you assume that a baseline admit rate of 50% would imply that 50% of prep-school alums go to Harvard, which is clearly a false implication?
robg 18y ago
The legacy families aren't one group, pooling their resources, to agitate to keep this perk. Each family acts according to their own interests and at a time of their choosing. Moreover, a family may have made previous donations on the assumption that subsequent generations would get favorable treatment. Those donations can't be pulled back. By contrast, if such admissions were found to be violating federal law, the government funds could be withheld en masse - current and future pledges all at once - if and until the policy is changed. That's a huge cudgel based on sound principles of punishment - immediate and severe. Agreed, on your point about other advantages. To my mind that's exactly why schools should be less willing to throw favors to the already advantaged.
- time_management 18y ago
  You're completely correct on your first point. One point that a lot of people miss about elite colleges is that their true clientele is an entrenched socioeconomic elite. The smart middle-class students are brought in to keep the U.S. upper-crust from falling into aristocratic irrelevance, but the future academics and scientists are definitively not the blue-blooded colleges' clientele. If they were, they wouldn't have to work so hard in high school to get in. Harvard College (not to pick on Harvard; you can sub in any elite college) is relatively separate from the University, with quite disparate goals and values. The former's an "experience" and the latter is a leading research institution. They have almost nothing in common aside from shared resources. As for elite East Coast colleges, although admissions officials are well-intended, their job is to maintain a system that serves the WASP "old board", and the extracurricular component of admissions, especially legacy admissions, exists for this purpose. If you think of Ivy League admissions as a reward for hard work in high school, the system's obviously unjust, because the rich kids play by a different set of rules. But if you recognize these colleges and their social purposes for what they are, it's still unfortunate, but not really an injustice worth getting pissed off about. In truth, the "social injustice" preventing middle-class students who supposedly "deserve" admission to Ivy League schools from getting in is extremely mild as far as social injustices go, given the very high quality (Ivy-comparable, sometimes better) of education available at the next 50 or so "runner up" colleges. All this said, I've come to the conclusion that the brokenness of U.S. undergraduate admissions is probably (paradoxically) a good thing for American society. Many other countries, such as in the E.U., have much better, academics-only, admissions systems. (This is why foreign grad students are shocked by the mediocrity of average Ivy undergrads.) So the bulk of the brilliant minds are concentrated at a few colleges, unlike in the U.S., where they're spread out among a couple hundred. The result of this is that, in Europe, it ends up mattering a lot more where one went to college; whereas in the U.S., it's held to be fairly irrelevant after age 23.

tokenadult 18y ago

What is the evidence that prep school graduates have a base acceptance rate at Harvard above 50 percent? That's not what the matriculation statistics at Exeter http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Profile_2009_10_7 http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Profile_2009_10_7(2).pdf tend to suggest.

time_management 18y ago
Those statistics show where the students actually go, not where they apply and are accepted. Why do you assume that a baseline admit rate of 50% would imply that 50% of prep-school alums go to Harvard, which is clearly a false implication?

robg 18y ago

The legacy families aren't one group, pooling their resources, to agitate to keep this perk. Each family acts according to their own interests and at a time of their choosing. Moreover, a family may have made previous donations on the assumption that subsequent generations would get favorable treatment. Those donations can't be pulled back. By contrast, if such admissions were found to be violating federal law, the government funds could be withheld en masse - current and future pledges all at once - if and until the policy is changed. That's a huge cudgel based on sound principles of punishment - immediate and severe. Agreed, on your point about other advantages. To my mind that's exactly why schools should be less willing to throw favors to the already advantaged.

time_management 18y ago
You're completely correct on your first point. One point that a lot of people miss about elite colleges is that their true clientele is an entrenched socioeconomic elite. The smart middle-class students are brought in to keep the U.S. upper-crust from falling into aristocratic irrelevance, but the future academics and scientists are definitively not the blue-blooded colleges' clientele. If they were, they wouldn't have to work so hard in high school to get in. Harvard College (not to pick on Harvard; you can sub in any elite college) is relatively separate from the University, with quite disparate goals and values. The former's an "experience" and the latter is a leading research institution. They have almost nothing in common aside from shared resources. As for elite East Coast colleges, although admissions officials are well-intended, their job is to maintain a system that serves the WASP "old board", and the extracurricular component of admissions, especially legacy admissions, exists for this purpose. If you think of Ivy League admissions as a reward for hard work in high school, the system's obviously unjust, because the rich kids play by a different set of rules. But if you recognize these colleges and their social purposes for what they are, it's still unfortunate, but not really an injustice worth getting pissed off about. In truth, the "social injustice" preventing middle-class students who supposedly "deserve" admission to Ivy League schools from getting in is extremely mild as far as social injustices go, given the very high quality (Ivy-comparable, sometimes better) of education available at the next 50 or so "runner up" colleges. All this said, I've come to the conclusion that the brokenness of U.S. undergraduate admissions is probably (paradoxically) a good thing for American society. Many other countries, such as in the E.U., have much better, academics-only, admissions systems. (This is why foreign grad students are shocked by the mediocrity of average Ivy undergrads.) So the bulk of the brilliant minds are concentrated at a few colleges, unlike in the U.S., where they're spread out among a couple hundred. The result of this is that, in Europe, it ends up mattering a lot more where one went to college; whereas in the U.S., it's held to be fairly irrelevant after age 23.