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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lol no

My kids all got in no legacy not athletic no extraordinary extra curricula

Yale Princeton Stanford

Let's try: rural, or parent's blue collar jobs

Wow, you are pathetic.

[Anonymous]

I don’t understand how colleges can be barred from considering race in admissions but allowed to do legacy

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lol no

My kids all got in no legacy not athletic no extraordinary extra curricula

Yale Princeton Stanford

Let's try: rural, or parent's blue collar jobs

URM? First generation? Low income? Rural? Underrepresented state?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an immigrant (white), so no legacies in my circle. However, I know 7 kids at Ivies - 3 Cornell, 3 UPenn, 1 Yale; I am sure none are legacies, URM or athletes. All graduated from public schools.

But are they first generation.

All the parents have college degrees, some have graduate degrees, mostly from US, so unlikely to count as first gen.

[Anonymous]

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 don't represent the whole. You should know that if you had an ivy education.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361

I did not go to harvard and I do not care what happens there.

[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.

Stats and major?

1580, 4.6 weighted, Engineering

Female? It's a hook for Engineering.

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

Stats and major?

1580, 4.6 weighted, Engineering

Female? It's a hook for Engineering.

This student went to Brown, so if a male, that's practically a hook at Brown.

[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.

Employers don't care if you not a legacy, and not a legacy doesn't mean not a hook. If an employer doesn't trust Harvard admissions office, send them your gpa and test scores and achievements.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an immigrant (white), so no legacies in my circle. However, I know 7 kids at Ivies - 3 Cornell, 3 UPenn, 1 Yale; I am sure none are legacies, URM or athletes. All graduated from public schools.

But are they first generation.

All the parents have college degrees, some have graduate degrees, mostly from US, so unlikely to count as first gen.

You wrote mostly from the US. The students who I know who got in marked that that they are first gen when in fact their parents have university degrees from Asia, Africa, and/or Latin America.

[Anonymous]

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.

Nah. The rich attend fancier schools with vast amounts of resources and do better on such tests. Did you think they were born smart?

Test prep, if it worked, would be an equalizer.

[Anonymous]

Similar experience with the people I know that went to Harvard,

It's a school for networking. It's effectively a country club. Everyone wants to join. Meanwhile, the genuinely talented kids go elsewhere

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP - are the high school students you know mostly white? Because one way of reading this post is that it reaffirms the recent Supreme Court decision - it’s become nearly impossible for white highly qualified high school students to get into Ivy League schools unless they are legacies or athletes.

I once went through published data from the litigation and the Harvard Crimson, etc, and added up the percentages of Harvard admits that were in a special category of any kind — URM, legacy, faculty, athlete, first gen, etc. As I recall, the total % came out to be well over 100%. Like 130% or so. Even if you assume a significant % of kids are in two categories (I think something like 20%+ of legacies are URM now?) the number of slots left for white kids with no hooks is tiny.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lol no

My kids all got in no legacy not athletic no extraordinary extra curricula

Yale Princeton Stanford

Let's try: rural, or parent's blue collar jobs

URM? First generation? Low income? Rural? Underrepresented state?

I know a family like this in DC and the father was a well known journalist. All the kids to Harvard/Stanford/etc, and the Mom thinks that if your kid didn’t get into an Ivy it was because they just weren’t very smart.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP - are the high school students you know mostly white? Because one way of reading this post is that it reaffirms the recent Supreme Court decision - it’s become nearly impossible for white highly qualified high school students to get into Ivy League schools unless they are legacies or athletes.

I once went through published data from the litigation and the Harvard Crimson, etc, and added up the percentages of Harvard admits that were in a special category of any kind — URM, legacy, faculty, athlete, first gen, etc. As I recall, the total % came out to be well over 100%. Like 130% or so. Even if you assume a significant % of kids are in two categories (I think something like 20%+ of legacies are URM now?) the number of slots left for white kids with no hooks is tiny.

The number of slots for all kids is tiny.

[Anonymous]

PP, first gen has nothing to do with being an immigrant. Surely you know this.