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[quote=Anonymous]Legacy admissions are clearly kind of an anachronism and are on their way out for a host of reasons. They made a lot more sense, I think, at a time when only a few people went to college and where you went to college wasn’t nearly so important as it is now. Back then, it was kind of win-win I think: families had a good idea where their kids were going to go to school, schools had a steady supply of kids emerging from a context of reasonably reliable vetting, people didn’t move around so much, and there was something to the idea that certain families and colleges had a meaningful relationship.

Now, all those conditions have changed.  Elite colleges are oversubscribed with qualified candidates; the college process has become a ruthless sorting mechanism in the allocation of various sorts of opportunities, making who gets into elite colleges more important and of more interest to people in general; legacy admissions are ideologically indefensible to a lot of people running colleges now, preserved only really for fundraising reasons and (just a guess) are a lot less consequential in admissions decisions than they were even a couple of decades ago; and there is no meaningful sense of relationships between families and colleges:  if you are in a historic context where a family has four generations of Harvard men, you can kind of see why it makes sense to both sides that there ought to be a fifth. But that was a long time ago; things are quite different now and that concept is not a real thing anymore. [/quote]

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