UPenn had a 47% acceptance rate for the Class of '95, it's not that much of a flex to be a legacy.

[Anonymous]

Many parents in my kids' private school flex that they are UPenn legacy or double legacy or even triple legacy and constantly talking about it like it was a big deal. I think UPenn had one of the highest admission rates of the lower ivies in the 90s. Cornell was around 30%. It must be a shock to the system that even UPenn has a single digit acceptance rate now, and legacy is no longer an auto admit like it was back in the day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Many parents in my kids' private school flex that they are UPenn legacy or double legacy or even triple legacy and constantly talking about it like it was a big deal. I think UPenn had one of the highest admission rates of the lower ivies in the 90s. Cornell was around 30%. It must be a shock to the system that even UPenn has a single digit acceptance rate now, and legacy is no longer an auto admit like it was back in the day.

In the 80s and 90s, people are going to Bingham and CUNY.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Many parents in my kids' private school flex that they are UPenn legacy or double legacy or even triple legacy and constantly talking about it like it was a big deal. I think UPenn had one of the highest admission rates of the lower ivies in the 90s. Cornell was around 30%. It must be a shock to the system that even UPenn has a single digit acceptance rate now, and legacy is no longer an auto admit like it was back in the day.

In the 80s and 90s, people are going to Bingham and CUNY.

?? Never heard of them.

[Anonymous]

Yeah. I'm younger than class of '95, but even when I applied, U Penn was my safety as the acceptance rate was in the 30%. That said, that's true of most legacies, particularly during the years before the elite schools admitted women. One of the admin officers who remembers Trump from when he applied as a transfer student notes it just wasn't that hard to get in decades ago, even to Wharton.

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/09/14/donald-trump-at-wharton-university-of-pennsylvania/

Mystery #1: After two years at Fordham University, did Trump need special treatment to gain admission to Wharton?
The answer begins with James A. Nolan, the Penn admissions officer who interviewed Trump and ushered his application through the vetting process, which he says he did at the behest of Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr. Nolan grew up in Queens and had been friends with Fred since high school in the mid-1950s. During an interview at his apartment on Washington Square, Nolan told me he spent a lot of time in those days at the Trump McMansion in Jamaica Estates, which he described as “very big, with lots of bedrooms” and blackface lawn jockeys lining the approach. Both friends planned to enroll at Penn, but only Nolan got accepted. Ten years later, Nolan was working in Penn’s admissions ­department — he would later become director of undergraduate admissions — when Fred called in a favor.

This was first revealed in Gwenda Blair’s book The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2000). “Whether that was 100 percent why he got in, I don’t know, but clearly it was helpful,” Blair told me. Blair says that at Nolan’s request she kept his identity a secret until earlier this summer, when Nolan granted interviews to the Washington Post and this magazine.

Nolan is adamant: Trump wasn’t accepted to Wharton solely on his say-so. Both the head of transfer student admissions and the vice dean reviewed Trump’s application and Nolan’s interview notes before giving final approval.

Now 80, Nolan says he found “no evidence” of Trump’s alleged “super genius” at the time. Furthermore, he says, Wharton wasn’t nearly as difficult to get into in the mid-’60s as it is today. Back then, according to Nolan, Penn was accepting 40 percent of all applicants, as opposed to its current cutthroat acceptance rate of seven percent. Not surprisingly, Trump remembers it differently. “I got in quickly and easily,” he told the Boston Globe in 2015. “And it’s one of the hardest schools to get into in the country — always has been.”

[Anonymous]

Great a thread about UPenn.

[Anonymous]

Isn’t this pretty much the case for most colleges that acceptance rates were higher back when us parents attended as compared to the lower acceptance rates for current students? The entire college admissions landscape is different for this generation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Isn’t this pretty much the case for most colleges that acceptance rates were higher back when us parents attended as compared to the lower acceptance rates for current students? The entire college admissions landscape is different for this generation.

You are correct

[Anonymous]

Back in my day (HS class of '90), Michigan OOS was a safety. They took literally everyone from my HS who applied, even kids with a 2.5.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Isn’t this pretty much the case for most colleges that acceptance rates were higher back when us parents attended as compared to the lower acceptance rates for current students? The entire college admissions landscape is different for this generation.

Of course. The Ivies only started admitting women in the late 1960s-early 1980s. So men weren't competing against half the population, and you see admissions rates drop when women started to apply. And now with the Internet, it's so much easier to apply to a college across the country or across the world. You're not looking at colleges that are only within driving range anymore. That's driven competition up a ton at elite colleges.

[Anonymous]

Admission stats for a single year from a single private high school are unlikely to be a statistically significant sample and unlikely to indicate anything whatsoever about chances for a student (a) not at that high school and (b) not a legacy.

[Anonymous]

So you could have gone too instead of grousing about it on dcum. My year the admit rate was actually 38% (Class of 1994).

Also Columbia had a 65% an acceptance rate in the 1980s and early 1990s. No one, I mean no one wanted to go to school in Harlem (really Morningside Heights).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Many parents in my kids' private school flex that they are UPenn legacy or double legacy or even triple legacy and constantly talking about it like it was a big deal. I think UPenn had one of the highest admission rates of the lower ivies in the 90s. Cornell was around 30%. It must be a shock to the system that even UPenn has a single digit acceptance rate now, and legacy is no longer an auto admit like it was back in the day.

In the 80s and 90s, people are going to Bingham and CUNY.

?? Never heard of them.

SUNY Binghamton and CCNY (City College of New York)

[Anonymous]

I am sure you went to a much better college because that is something that someone who went to a much better college would feel the need to say

[Anonymous]

🤦‍♂️

[Anonymous]

OP, I hope this isn't news to you, but being a legacy isn't any sort of flex. It just means you have extra privilege due to your parents.

Also, being a legacy has never been an "auto-admit" at elite colleges. It just means that all else fixed, you have a far greater chance of getting in than a non-legacy, 5x as great according to the Chetty/Deming paper, which is a huge boost. But if the admit rate is 3% of applicants, there are still many legacy kids not getting in.