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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.)

[b]Granted, I know lots of friends who attended Ivy League colleges and whose kids did NOT get in, despite the kids being top students[/b].
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.[/quote]

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

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).[/quote]

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