Anonymous wrote:I am fairly confident that someone has done this analysis before in a more rigorous manner than what you are proposing, unless you are a statistician or academic.

Anonymous wrote:If this is simply an academic exercise, go for it.

If you think it will in any way inform your kid's college acceptance, you are nuts.

SAM2 wrote:Let me clarify: I'm not particularly focused on proving or disproving that legacy affects admissions. There's lots of research showing it does have an effect, and many colleges freely admit it. How much effect legacy actually has is often debated, and I think it has less impact than many people assume. So maybe that's worth exploring, but it's more efficient to rely on others' research into that topic rather than creating my own.

I think what I was envisioning is looking at the question of whether legacy has a big impact at particular schools. In some respects, it would be a backdoor way of assessing whether or not certain schools have lots of legacies skewing their college results, or instead if the college results seem unaffected (which would suggest legacy plays little role on how those particular schools' students do at college admissions).

I acknowledge the confounding variable problem someone pointed out. If one school's college admissions results do not correlate with academic results, I cannot know whether the lack of correlation is due to legacy effects, or affirmative action, or athletics, or something else. That's makes things harder. I suppose if the correlation is about the same for different schools though, then that would suggest all those other potentially confounding factors are really not very significant as a practical matter, or at least cancel one another out.