College admissions and legacy factor

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:3:26 again. Now I remember. Somebody at Princeton has done a study along these lines: http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Opportunity%20Cost%20of%20Admission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20June%202005.pdf. This study adjusted for legacy, race and athletic recruitment. I don't have time to reread the study, so I'm going to have to rely on the handy Wikipedia summary of this same study (by all means double-check this against the actual study). So, according to Wikipedia's summary of the study, the following hooks are equivalent to adding/subtracting SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):

Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: -50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160

Another way to think about the legacy effect is just a pretty straight-forward calculation. If Harvard takes 30% of legacy applicants, and 6% of regular applicants, then a kid who is a legacy has a 5x advantage over a kid who is not a legacy.

In any case, I'm not sure you could readily get the dataset you want without cooperation from schools or colleges. And for that, it would probably help to be a tenured professor at a place like Princeton. You would need many years of data in order to eliminate cohort effects. For example, suppose this year STA's graduating class has 30 legacies at whatever "selective college" criteria you decide on, and Sidwell's graduating class has only 5--but maybe next year this is completely reversed. Plus, as I wrote earlier, the impact of legacy would be clearer if you have a dataset that lets you adjust for race and athletic recruits.

13:26 one more time. I see my link doesn't work. Google "Espenshade Chung Legacy 2005" and you should be able to find it. It's "The Opportunity Cost of Admissions Preferences at Elite Universities."

Anyway, thinking about this some more, it looks like you're trying to prove one or both of two things:
(1) legacy preferences don't explain *all* the admits from elite privates to highly selective universities. Maybe because there are so many qualified kids who get in on their own merits. So if STA sends 4 kids to Harvard, maybe 1-2 are legacies and the other 2-3 got in because of stellar academics or maybe athletic or other superb talents.
(2) legacy preferences somehow operate differently at elite private schools than at non-elite privates or publics. Maybe because, if you have a group of kids with SATs=1500, a 160-point SAT preference isn't going to be as useful because the SATs top out at 1600 (the Espenshade study used the old SAT=1600 baseline).

I think you'd also need another variable to understand if legacy status helps. You'd need too know the # of applicants to elite universities. Then you can tell if legacy helped actual applicants. As opposed to being distracted by the fact that, for whatever reason, few kids from private school X actually applied to highly selective universities in a given year. In other words, and depending on how you model this, you would look at a group of otherwise qualified NMSSFs, observe the ones who have legacy status, and conclude that legacy status doesn't help when in fact maybe the family couldn't afford an Ivy and didn't even apply. Or maybe the kids at one school soured on Princeton dining clubs (yes, this actually happened in DD's class) and few kids applied this year. So you need to know who applied, whether or not they had legacy status.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:3:26 again. Now I remember. Somebody at Princeton has done a study along these lines: http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Opportunity%20Cost%20of%20Admission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20June%202005.pdf. This study adjusted for legacy, race and athletic recruitment. I don't have time to reread the study, so I'm going to have to rely on the handy Wikipedia summary of this same study (by all means double-check this against the actual study). So, according to Wikipedia's summary of the study, the following hooks are equivalent to adding/subtracting SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):

Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: -50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160

Another way to think about the legacy effect is just a pretty straight-forward calculation. If Harvard takes 30% of legacy applicants, and 6% of regular applicants, then a kid who is a legacy has a 5x advantage over a kid who is not a legacy.

In any case, I'm not sure you could readily get the dataset you want without cooperation from schools or colleges. And for that, it would probably help to be a tenured professor at a place like Princeton. You would need many years of data in order to eliminate cohort effects. For example, suppose this year STA's graduating class has 30 legacies at whatever "selective college" criteria you decide on, and Sidwell's graduating class has only 5--but maybe next year this is completely reversed. Plus, as I wrote earlier, the impact of legacy would be clearer if you have a dataset that lets you adjust for race and athletic recruits.

The results don't surprise me

[Anonymous]

Another thing that is considered is how much money the family has donated. Legacy without donations doesn't help as much as the kid that has his family name on a dorm, library, sports complex etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another thing that is considered is how much money the family has donated. Legacy without donations doesn't help as much as the kid that has his family name on a dorm, library, sports complex etc.

You're talking about development cases, if the family still has its money. This gets you bumped into a different type of admissions path from the simple legacy admissions path.

Legacy without the building can still help, as long as the parent has a track record of giving $100 or whatever over many years. Or participating in alumni events like interviewing applicants. On the other hand, it doesn't help to give $100 starting in your kid's junior year. Colleges are looking to see if the family has an attachment to the school. It's this attachment, rather than simply being the offspring of an alumn, is what helps.

Of course if will help if you're the sort of kid whose family has donated a building. But these are very rare cases, because there just aren't so many families who donated a building 50 years ago, because there are only so many buildings.

The attitude towards legacies and development cases also varies among universities. Harvard doesn't need your $100,000 as much as some other colleges. And some universities love their alumns more than others. All of which SAM2 would have to adjust for somehow.

[Anonymous]

If you are trying to pick a school and looking at their college admissions- don't. because the legacy, minority status etc factors make it too difficult to interpret the results.
Instead: look at the number of nat merit semifinalists for the past 5 years. that will tell you if they have good teaching and smart kids. if your child is smart and hard working and can benefit from the teaching then pick that school- then when you are at the school, find out where the smartest kids are legacies and DONT apply there early, because it will be hard to compete with the legacy . at ncs 2 girls who were minority and legacy and NOT in the top 20% for grades in the class still got into harvard. so that gives you some idea. legacy matters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you are trying to pick a school and looking at their college admissions- don't. because the legacy, minority status etc factors make it too difficult to interpret the results.
Instead: look at the number of nat merit semifinalists for the past 5 years. that will tell you if they have good teaching and smart kids. if your child is smart and hard working and can benefit from the teaching then pick that school- then when you are at the school, find out where the smartest kids are legacies and DONT apply there early, because it will be hard to compete with the legacy . at ncs 2 girls who were minority and legacy and NOT in the top 20% for grades in the class still got into harvard. so that gives you some idea. legacy matters.

Don't do this - don't pick the school with the highest NMSSFs.

The # of NMSSFs tells you very little about the teaching at the school, and there's no special sauce that will turn your kid into an NMSSF. Any podunk school can teach the pre-calc, english and vocabulary that are on the SAT, and if the school can't teach this, a good prep company can. The # of NMSSFs just tells you that the school screens for high SSATs and SATs for middle and high school admissions, so for this reason you might be right about the smart peer group (although there are other things to look for in a peer group, but that's a different thread). It also tells you that the school has a pretty high average income, because NMSSF is associated with income. It also tells you that families can afford good prep classes.

So if you pick the school with the highest # of NMSSFs, -- your kid will just be competing against all these other NMSSFs, who were NMSSF material before they got to the school. Sort of like sending your kid to a school with a lot of legacies.