Aha moment - I know 7 current Ivy League students, and all of them happen to be legacies

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t smart, high achievers beget smart, high achievers, on average?

Yes. Legacy kids must have the stats to get in. I know many who were not strong enough students, and were not admitted. And some with outstanding stats but not admitted.

There's a good article about the real corruption being in the area of athletic recruits, for whom academic standards are substantially lowered by contrast:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/09/opinions/college-admissions-elite-sports-harvard-affirmative-action-macintosh/index.html

Wow, recruited athletes get a 1000% bump, and with lowered academic standards to boot? That's not right.

+1. Athletic recruiting has 10x the impact of legacy these days, yet legacy gets 10x the attention post-Supreme Court decision.

Princeton just had its first NCAA wrestling champion in over 70 years. In an institution that believes in educating both the body and the mind, why isn’t that level of skill and effort as worthy as being really good at French or astronomy? I’m sure that wrestler was no slouch in the classroom just to get into Princeton. Maybe there should be a minimum standard of athletic skill required of the able-bodied applicants — a lot of us as adults put as much or more effort into being fit as we do in the pursuit of knowledge.

It is “as worthy”. Just not 10x as worthy — which is how it is treated in admissions, in case you have not figured that out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:With all of the discussion of legacy admissions in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, I was kind of pondering how much of a difference legacy status makes.

My DS and DD are current college students, and so I've been aware of where their friends go, and where my friends' kids are going to college.

I realized that, of the 7 current students that I know at Princeton and Harvard, they are all legacies. (I just realized that I also know 2 current Cornell students, both of whom are legacies.)

Granted, I know lots of friends who attended Ivy League colleges and whose kids did NOT get in, despite the kids being top students.
Also, the students that I know at Princeton/Harvard/Cornell are definitely top students, hard workers, and good people in general. They are qualified to be at these colleges, for sure.

This is an anecdote of course, but it was kind of eye-opening to realize that extent to which legacy matters.

As an aside, I take some comfort in knowing how much progress Harvard has made in admissions just since the 1960's. I know someone (with whom I went to graduate school) whose mother and all aunts and uncles (5 in total) all went to Harvard in the 1960's. My friend kind of laughed about it later, as he realized that not all of his aunts/uncles were top students by any means - decent but not high-achievers like today's applicants need to be. They were all legacies, and it was a done deal that they would get admitted at that time. By the 1980's, it seems like that extent of obvious legacy admissions was not as widespread.

Idea from the Financial Samurai blog: For those students who attended an Ivy League college and who are NOT a legacy -- to get full credit on your resume for getting admitted without a hook, write "not a legacy" next to your college name.

This has been my experience. I think I only know one classmate whose perfect-stats kids got in.

Other than Ketani Jackson Brown's kids, but obviously that's a special case (on top of the fact that her husband loved to share that he was 6th generation Harvard).

Interesting. I never knew until her confirmation and have known them for awhile....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
High stat DC got into an Ivy this year.
- not a legacy
- not an athlete
- not an URM
- not a faculty kid
- TJ High
- national awards
- Research Publications
- Internships

Yes, some magnet kids with national awards are getting in. What about high-stats kids at other schools?

Yes. Plenty of them every year

It's very rare in DMV, where there are so many hooked students to choose from.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
High stat DC got into an Ivy this year.
- not a legacy
- not an athlete
- not an URM
- not a faculty kid
- TJ High
- national awards
- Research Publications
- Internships

Yes, some magnet kids with national awards are getting in. What about high-stats kids at other schools?

Yes. Plenty of them every year

It's very rare in DMV, where there are so many hooked students to choose from.

It's hardly rare in this area. Stop lying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t smart, high achievers beget smart, high achievers, on average?

Yes. Legacy kids must have the stats to get in. I know many who were not strong enough students, and were not admitted. And some with outstanding stats but not admitted.

There's a good article about the real corruption being in the area of athletic recruits, for whom academic standards are substantially lowered by contrast:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/09/opinions/college-admissions-elite-sports-harvard-affirmative-action-macintosh/index.html

Wow, recruited athletes get a 1000% bump, and with lowered academic standards to boot? That's not right.

+1. Athletic recruiting has 10x the impact of legacy these days, yet legacy gets 10x the attention post-Supreme Court decision.

Princeton just had its first NCAA wrestling champion in over 70 years. In an institution that believes in educating both the body and the mind, why isn’t that level of skill and effort as worthy as being really good at French or astronomy? I’m sure that wrestler was no slouch in the classroom just to get into Princeton. Maybe there should be a minimum standard of athletic skill required of the able-bodied applicants — a lot of us as adults put as much or more effort into being fit as we do in the pursuit of knowledge.

That’s great and all, and a feather in the school’s cap, but it’s a college—not a gym with some classes added on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t smart, high achievers beget smart, high achievers, on average?

Yes. Legacy kids must have the stats to get in. I know many who were not strong enough students, and were not admitted. And some with outstanding stats but not admitted.

There's a good article about the real corruption being in the area of athletic recruits, for whom academic standards are substantially lowered by contrast:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/09/opinions/college-admissions-elite-sports-harvard-affirmative-action-macintosh/index.html

Wow, recruited athletes get a 1000% bump, and with lowered academic standards to boot? That's not right.

Wow, Harvard needs 37 varsity sports? It’s affirmative action, folks, primarily for white kids whose stats, one might think, wouldn’t otherwise be competitive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t smart, high achievers beget smart, high achievers, on average?

Yes. Legacy kids must have the stats to get in. I know many who were not strong enough students, and were not admitted. And some with outstanding stats but not admitted.

There's a good article about the real corruption being in the area of athletic recruits, for whom academic standards are substantially lowered by contrast:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/09/opinions/college-admissions-elite-sports-harvard-affirmative-action-macintosh/index.html

Wow, recruited athletes get a 1000% bump, and with lowered academic standards to boot? That's not right.

+1. Athletic recruiting has 10x the impact of legacy these days, yet legacy gets 10x the attention post-Supreme Court decision.

Institutions should be *forced* to reveal the academic stats of all athletic recruits. Full transparency. Where is that lawsuit?

It’s coming soon enough.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t smart, high achievers beget smart, high achievers, on average?

Yes. Legacy kids must have the stats to get in. I know many who were not strong enough students, and were not admitted. And some with outstanding stats but not admitted.

There's a good article about the real corruption being in the area of athletic recruits, for whom academic standards are substantially lowered by contrast:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/09/opinions/college-admissions-elite-sports-harvard-affirmative-action-macintosh/index.html

Wow, recruited athletes get a 1000% bump, and with lowered academic standards to boot? That's not right.

+1. Athletic recruiting has 10x the impact of legacy these days, yet legacy gets 10x the attention post-Supreme Court decision.

Princeton just had its first NCAA wrestling champion in over 70 years. In an institution that believes in educating both the body and the mind, why isn’t that level of skill and effort as worthy as being really good at French or astronomy? I’m sure that wrestler was no slouch in the classroom just to get into Princeton. Maybe there should be a minimum standard of athletic skill required of the able-bodied applicants — a lot of us as adults put as much or more effort into being fit as we do in the pursuit of knowledge.

That’s great and all, and a feather in the school’s cap, but it’s a college—not a gym with some classes added on.

Yeah. I think a former Williams professor famously called Williams (near 40% athletes) a “Nike camp with enrichment classes.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t smart, high achievers beget smart, high achievers, on average?

Yes. Legacy kids must have the stats to get in. I know many who were not strong enough students, and were not admitted. And some with outstanding stats but not admitted.

There's a good article about the real corruption being in the area of athletic recruits, for whom academic standards are substantially lowered by contrast:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/09/opinions/college-admissions-elite-sports-harvard-affirmative-action-macintosh/index.html

Wow, recruited athletes get a 1000% bump, and with lowered academic standards to boot? That's not right.

+1. Athletic recruiting has 10x the impact of legacy these days, yet legacy gets 10x the attention post-Supreme Court decision.

Institutions should be *forced* to reveal the academic stats of all athletic recruits. Full transparency. Where is that lawsuit?

It’s coming soon enough.

It will be dismissed. It would be nothing like the recent SC case. Athletic recruiting is clearly based on merit. You can argue that many sports require money or that schools don't need so many sports (or sports at all) but you can't say athletic recruits are like legacies in terms of the boost since it wasn't something they just lucked into birth wise.

[Anonymous]

If the athletes from top schools continue to have great results after graduation and help create a campus community that the school, students, and alumni value, then why would the schools seriously consider major change at this point? I agree that sports like squash, crew, and sailing that are hardly attended by non family members and are truly elitist should be things schools consider getting rid of but everyone needs to understand that the Ivy League, power D1 schools like Stanford, NW, and Duke and top D3s like MIT, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Hopkins, and Chicago have no intention of being anything like Oxford or Cambridge in viewing athletics just like any other school extracurricular activity. They also don't have a legal need to nor do I foresee one based on the recent SC decision.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:High stat DC got into an Ivy this year.
-not a legacy
-not an athlete
-not an URM
-not a faculty kid
-public school (not TJ)
-no crazy national/international awards
Just got super super lucky.

Stats and major?

1580, 4.6 weighted, Engineering

Very impressive, congrats to your DC on getting in for one of the toughest majors. Essays must have been excellent!

The sad thing is the assumption that a kid with these stats wouldn't normally get in without a hook. Back in the day they would have sailed in!

Test prep culture has considerably cheapened the value of a 1580.

No, 1580 is very hard to achieve prep or not.
Everybody should study and prepare hard for major test such as SAT, MCAT, BAR exam, Professional Engineer exam, etc.

No one “preps” for an eye exam. PP was talking about “back in the day,” and back in the day we were told that the SAT was unpreppable.

It's unpreppable if you have fooled around for 11 years of fundamental education.

Back in the day, many kids took Princeton Review/Kaplan SAT prep courses and did great. What are you talking about? Prepping for tests has been around forever.

Yeah, I taught for PR in the 90s. I knew of people taking Kaplan in the 80s, but the general climate was not prep oriented. Also, at least in the 90s, it was more a priority for certain cultures-- almost all my students were south or east Asian (mostly south in my area).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If the athletes from top schools continue to have great results after graduation and help create a campus community that the school, students, and alumni value, then why would the schools seriously consider major change at this point? I agree that sports like squash, crew, and sailing that are hardly attended by non family members and are truly elitist should be things schools consider getting rid of but everyone needs to understand that the Ivy League, power D1 schools like Stanford, NW, and Duke and top D3s like MIT, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Hopkins, and Chicago have no intention of being anything like Oxford or Cambridge in viewing athletics just like any other school extracurricular activity. They also don't have a legal need to nor do I foresee one based on the recent SC decision.

Why? Because athletes are overwhelmingly white. And we just had a Supreme Court decision about affirmative action. Amherst has more athletes than the entire University of Alabama. Get it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If the athletes from top schools continue to have great results after graduation and help create a campus community that the school, students, and alumni value, then why would the schools seriously consider major change at this point? I agree that sports like squash, crew, and sailing that are hardly attended by non family members and are truly elitist should be things schools consider getting rid of but everyone needs to understand that the Ivy League, power D1 schools like Stanford, NW, and Duke and top D3s like MIT, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Hopkins, and Chicago have no intention of being anything like Oxford or Cambridge in viewing athletics just like any other school extracurricular activity. They also don't have a legal need to nor do I foresee one based on the recent SC decision.

Why? Because athletes are overwhelmingly white. And we just had a Supreme Court decision about affirmative action. Amherst has more athletes than the entire University of Alabama. Get it?

Getting rid of athletics won’t bring in any more URMs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If the athletes from top schools continue to have great results after graduation and help create a campus community that the school, students, and alumni value, then why would the schools seriously consider major change at this point? I agree that sports like squash, crew, and sailing that are hardly attended by non family members and are truly elitist should be things schools consider getting rid of but everyone needs to understand that the Ivy League, power D1 schools like Stanford, NW, and Duke and top D3s like MIT, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Hopkins, and Chicago have no intention of being anything like Oxford or Cambridge in viewing athletics just like any other school extracurricular activity. They also don't have a legal need to nor do I foresee one based on the recent SC decision.

Why? Because athletes are overwhelmingly white. And we just had a Supreme Court decision about affirmative action. Amherst has more athletes than the entire University of Alabama. Get it?

Getting rid of athletics won’t bring in any more URMs.

Yes it would, by definition.

1) You must not be aware of the URM proportion of athletes at top schools. And 2) you must not be aware of how schools are already thinking about replacing URM slots with low-income and Questbridge slots (and it’s moderate correlation with URMs).

Thus, if there are 100% non-athlete slots, that means more low-income URMs. If athletic recruiting was cut in half at, say, Williams (so there is “only” 20%), there would be 80% non-athlete slots for those URMs. That’s still way more than the existing 60% non-athlete slots (because of its ridiculous 40% athletes). Again, by definition it means more URMs…

That’s enough math spoon feeding for the day: open up wide, and swallow.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:With all of the discussion of legacy admissions in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision, I was kind of pondering how much of a difference legacy status makes.

My DS and DD are current college students, and so I've been aware of where their friends go, and where my friends' kids are going to college.

I realized that, of the 7 current students that I know at Princeton and Harvard, they are all legacies. (I just realized that I also know 2 current Cornell students, both of whom are legacies.)

Granted, I know lots of friends who attended Ivy League colleges and whose kids did NOT get in, despite the kids being top students.
Also, the students that I know at Princeton/Harvard/Cornell are definitely top students, hard workers, and good people in general. They are qualified to be at these colleges, for sure.

This is an anecdote of course, but it was kind of eye-opening to realize that extent to which legacy matters.

As an aside, I take some comfort in knowing how much progress Harvard has made in admissions just since the 1960's. I know someone (with whom I went to graduate school) whose mother and all aunts and uncles (5 in total) all went to Harvard in the 1960's. My friend kind of laughed about it later, as he realized that not all of his aunts/uncles were top students by any means - decent but not high-achievers like today's applicants need to be. They were all legacies, and it was a done deal that they would get admitted at that time. By the 1980's, it seems like that extent of obvious legacy admissions was not as widespread.

Idea from the Financial Samurai blog: For those students who attended an Ivy League college and who are NOT a legacy -- to get full credit on your resume for getting admitted without a hook, write "not a legacy" next to your college name.

This has been my experience. I think I only know one classmate whose perfect-stats kids got in.

Other than Ketani Jackson Brown's kids, but obviously that's a special case (on top of the fact that her husband loved to share that he was 6th generation Harvard).

Interesting. I never knew until her confirmation and have known them for awhile....

I went to college with them. He made sure everyone knew, but perhaps became more discreet as he matured.