Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:It doesn't. I'm a 3x generation Cornell legacy. My cousins and I all became PhDs. I'm the only one that got in to Cornell but I had everything you need to get into elite schools (national awards) they did not.
Legacy preferences do not mean that every legacy candidate gets admitted. It means they are
far more likely to get admitted, relative to a comparable candidate without the legacy preference. Your story about your single family does not mean that legacy preferences do not exist.
There are studies with actual data which show otherwise. This 2023 one by two Harvard professors shows that legacy candidates are 5X more likely to get into the group of "Ivy Plus" schools than non-legacy candidates. The authors note: “It’s absolutely not true that legacy applicants have an advantage in getting into other institutions where their parents did not go — admissions rates look basically the same. Showing you that it really is about being a legacy applicant, as opposed to other factors.”
https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Nontech_Figures.pdf
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