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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know a lot more UVA legacy than Ivy[/quo



UVA dropped legacy admission preference this summer. google it

[Anonymous]

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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.

Not a great comparison because the SAT is designed to determine kid’s ability to learn. The bar exam and professional engineering exams are to test what they have already learned.

I
-1 it's a great comparison because everyone is free to prepare.

It's like the Olympics where athletes train for 4 or more years. They are supposed to train - even if training gives them advantage. I don't know any elite athlete who simply shows up and expect to win the gold. Showong up and expect to take home the gold on the strength of the color of skin happens only at Harvard.

This illustrates the changed attitude toward the SAT since “back in the day.” I think it’s a terrible waste. The SAT used to measure aptitude. Now there’s no way to tell whether a 1540 was achieved cold or after months of intense study. That means it’s not a reliable measure of either effort or aptitude.

No it didn't. SAT never measured aptitude. "Back in the day," they marketed it as such but had to change the name from "Aptitude " to "Assessment " because it was proven that it did not measure aptitude. It never did. It still doesn't.

The entire purpose of the SAT was to break the hold that mediocre WASPs had on elite institutions. Gentleman Cs and all that. Suddenly, there was a supposedly quantitive tool that could measure the aptitude of potential students. And it actually worked for a while. From the 70s to maybe the early 2000s, you could genuinely argue that the elite schools did represent a meritocracy. There were Jewish students. There were Asian students. There were black students, Obama was at Columbia. Princeton and Harvard weren't WASP central anymore.

I recall an older family member saying you should always have a Jewish doctor. His reasoning was that it was so damn hard for a Jew to go to medical school in the 1950s that anyone that managed was going to be really damn good.

Quantitive tests like the SAT were supposed to replace bias and measure talent.

It's interesting to see where we're at today.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Before this spins into the inevitable Republican bashing, allow me to point out that after G.W. Bush bravely cheered his way through Yale, subsequent Bush children went to UTexas, Tulane, UVa, & Boston College.

W’s daughter went to Yale

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wut? I went to an ivy league school and almost nobody I knew was legacy. One person was the first in her entire county to have ever gone to any ivy league school.

YOu may not have known they were legacy because we didn't walk around with T-shirts emblazoned "I am a legacy". no one in my harvard class discussed that or financial aid. I remember someone thinking my dad was the person who got me in - no - it was my straight As, SATs and slot in my high school class and gift for writing that got me in.

I found it interesting from the Harvard Crimson survey that legacies had higher average SAT scores than the non-legacy students

Adjusted for race?

Non-legacies will disproportionately be urm.

I want to know what the scores and grades for Asian, Jewish, and gentile white non legacies vs legacies is.

[Anonymous]

My kids' HS is majority URM and high performing (shocking that this can be a thing, DCUM, I know!)

So yeah, I know a lot of Ivy League kids who are not legacies.

[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
-public school (not TJ)
-no crazy national/international awards
Just got super super lucky.

Cornell?

Nothing wrong with Cornell, but no.

Debate Team?
Newspaper editor?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wut? I went to an ivy league school and almost nobody I knew was legacy. One person was the first in her entire county to have ever gone to any ivy league school.

YOu may not have known they were legacy because we didn't walk around with T-shirts emblazoned "I am a legacy". no one in my harvard class discussed that or financial aid. I remember someone thinking my dad was the person who got me in - no - it was my straight As, SATs and slot in my high school class and gift for writing that got me in.

I found it interesting from the Harvard Crimson survey that legacies had higher average SAT scores than the non-legacy students

Adjusted for race?

Non-legacies will disproportionately be urm.

I want to know what the scores and grades for Asian, Jewish, and gentile white non legacies vs legacies is.

Do you REALLY want to know?

Of course not.

[Anonymous]

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.

My kids are upper Ivy League students. No legacy. Not recruited athletes. Not URM. Not children of VIPs or celebrities or the upper echelons of government.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Not a great comparison because the SAT is designed to determine kid’s ability to learn. The bar exam and professional engineering exams are to test what they have already learned.

I
-1 it's a great comparison because everyone is free to prepare.

It's like the Olympics where athletes train for 4 or more years. They are supposed to train - even if training gives them advantage. I don't know any elite athlete who simply shows up and expect to win the gold. Showong up and expect to take home the gold on the strength of the color of skin happens only at Harvard.

This illustrates the changed attitude toward the SAT since “back in the day.” I think it’s a terrible waste. The SAT used to measure aptitude. Now there’s no way to tell whether a 1540 was achieved cold or after months of intense study. That means it’s not a reliable measure of either effort or aptitude.

Sure it is. Just because someone studied for the SAT doesn't make them dumb. In fact it shows discipline and a willingness to learn, which are very good predictors for college success. Colleges all know this. There's a reason MIT went back to test mandatory. Test Optional was a fail. The kids accepted at MIT that went test optional could not perform at the same level as prior years. So MIT now requires SAT/ACT scores. Data is data. The schools that remain test optional are doing so simply to fatten up their applicant numbers or to hit their DEI targets. White and Asian kids from the burbs applying to competitive schools still need to take the SAT/ACT.

You die on the MIT hill if you want.

1800+ colleges are test optional, including HYPS, and most of the T50.

It's not going away.

+1000

[Anonymous]

Yeah – I can imagine a few colleges, maybe more of a conservative/traditionalist bent, bringing back test requirements within the next few years. But the great majority won't. Why would they? They can still pretty much select the kind of class that they want, and they get more applicants to boot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wut? I went to an ivy league school and almost nobody I knew was legacy. One person was the first in her entire county to have ever gone to any ivy league school.

YOu may not have known they were legacy because we didn't walk around with T-shirts emblazoned "I am a legacy". no one in my harvard class discussed that or financial aid. I remember someone thinking my dad was the person who got me in - no - it was my straight As, SATs and slot in my high school class and gift for writing that got me in.

I found it interesting from the Harvard Crimson survey that legacies had higher average SAT scores than the non-legacy students

Adjusted for race?

Non-legacies will disproportionately be urm.

I want to know what the scores and grades for Asian, Jewish, and gentile white non legacies vs legacies is.

So many messed up assumptions there.

[Anonymous]

Hopkins dropped legacy and it’s only 16% white!