Reply to NYT: "Peak College Admissions Insanity"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No, it isn’t. I know legacies at Cornell, Brown, Chicago and Yale after not getting into Princeton. [/quote]

Princeton is in the worst possible place with legacy. The numbers are something like

1/4 legacies get in

1/40 non-legacies get in

The alumni community thinks legacy is worthless, because most of their kids get denied. Meanwhile everyone else can see that if you aren’t a legacy you’re in a much worse position. [/quote]

+1000 Yes your legacy kid may not have gotten in because when admission rates fall to 3 pct it is hard for anyone to get in. But legacy  kids still have a much much better shot than the kid who isn’t genetically blessed with an elite school alum parents.  [/quote]
You are assuming that legacies and non-legacies, on average, have the exact same qualifications otherwise.[/quote]

Nowhere in the prior posts does it say that legacies and non legacies are exactly the same.  But if your argument is that because your legacy kid or some other legacy kid got rejected that legacies are no longer a big hook, that’s not an evidence based argument.  [/quote]
My argument is that we have no idea exactly how big the legacy hook is, because the statistics you love to cite don't take into account that legacies as a whole are likely coming from families with more money. Which means better test scores, more extra-curriculars that create other hooks (i.e., recruited athlete in niche sports), etc.  In other words, legacies often have at least some other big hooks or other qualifications too that explain why they're being admitted at a higher rate than non-legacies.[/quote]

There are data that disprove your argument.  You really think researchers haven't bothered to control for high socioeconomic status, rich kid sports and private schools?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/upshot/ivy-league-legacy-admissions.html
[quote]
New data shows that at elite private colleges, the children of alumni, known as legacies, are in fact slightly more qualified than typical applicants, as judged by admissions offices. Even if their legacy status weren’t considered, they would still be about 33 percent more likely to be admitted than applicants with the same test scores, based on all their other qualifications, demographic characteristics and parents’ income and education, according to an analysis conducted by Opportunity Insights, a research group at Harvard.

Researchers said that was unsurprising, given that these students grow up in more educated families. Their parents may be more able to invest in their educations, pay for things like private schools or exclusive sports, and offer insight into what the college is looking for.
Yet the admissions advantage they get at many elite colleges for being children of alumni is far greater than that. They were nearly four times as likely to be admitted as applicants with the same test scores, according to the data, released Monday. And legacy students from the richest 1 percent of families were five times as likely to be admitted.

The new study was based in part on internal admissions data from several of a group of 12 elite colleges: the Ivy League as well as Duke, M.I.T., the University of Chicago and Stanford. Because the researchers promised anonymity to the colleges that shared it, they would not say whether Harvard was one of them, but they said that admissions practices were generally consistent across other colleges in the group, except for M.I.T.[/quote][/quote] Controlling for test scores is pretty useless given how low the ceiling is relative to the level of accomplishment that these schools look for. The correct way to do the study would be to control for overall application strength, but if course that's impossible (by design) as the admissions process is holistic and thus not quantitative.[/quote]

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