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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If SCEA is so bad for a certain profile of kid (non hook), why do all the high school counselors seem to still insist the odds are better?  [/quote]

I think because the odds are never great, and a deferral seems to slightly raise your chances in rd. [/quote]

Sure, but there is often a very high opportunity cost for unhooked students from the burbs applying SCEA to HYPS. Of course a handful of random unhooked students get in, but these students, no matter how brilliant, are not a priority for these schools. They want the major hooks - athlete, rich, prominent family, legacy, faculty kids. And they want first generation, low income, and rural. Not a lot of spots available otherwise.

And in the meantime, they have given up their chance to apply ED to Penn, Duke, Brown, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Rice, Cornell, Northwestern, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. And Regular Decision is exceptionally difficult at most of these schools. I think the RD acceptance rate at Duke and Vandy was about 3 percent last year.

For MC and UMC students without hooks, I think you really need to love Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford to apply SCEA. Like, you can't imagine yourself anywhere else. But the risk is incredibly high. The RD round is carnage for a lot of great students. [/quote]

I think I agree with you. We have a Princeton legacy with a tippy top SAT score, top grades and rigor, and good extracurriculars, and even we are not sure whether to take this chance or not next year, given that legacy does not appear to be a strong advantage these days from what we were told. DC loves Princeton but also almost equally loves one of the other schools on your list that gives a clear advantage to ED applicants, so it may just not be worth the risk and hassle to try for SCEA. [/quote]

Of course being a legacy is still a huge advantage--one research paper says it gives the student 4x greater chance of being admitted than a comparable applicant.   But when the selectivity is 3% of applicants, even 4x greater chance of being admitted doesn't mean your kid will get in.[/quote]

That was an old research paper. Not at all current.[/quote]
A 2023 research paper is not "old."  https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31492/w31492.pdf
Feel free to cite the newer research you know of on legacy application preferences.[/quote]

The Chetty et al. paper may not be old, but the data they use is not current (1998-2015). It's a great paper, but nobody should be assuming that the trends from that period are all the same today. There is a dearth of contemporary data, so we can only guess, but the the consensus is that legacy is no longer as big of an advantage as it once was, especially due to all the criticism that the schools receive for favoring legacy, owing in part to this very paper. [/quote]

Will you cite newer research that contradicts what the Chetty paper found?  Or are you just unilaterally deciding that its findings are invalid because it's "old."[/quote]

I am not a researcher and I don't have access to current data, but you have to admit that 1998-2015 data is old in the admissions landscape. Feel free to trust the sources you prefer, but for myself I would prefer to listen to what the admissions offices themselves are saying currently, as well as what college admissions officers are saying based on their own students' results in recent years. Our school's college admissions officers have told us that they do not think legacy will significantly weight the scales for our high stats kid. In the past couple of years, being a first gen student weighs significantly more than legacy. [/quote]

That FGLI weighs more than legacy preference does not mean that legacy preference doesn't exist.  And with a 3% admit rate, every preference matters.[/quote]

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