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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP, if you google Harvard Crimson Legacy Admit Rate you will find a May 2011 Crimson article where Dean Fitzsimmons says the admit rate for legacies is around 30%. [/quote]

Personally, I find the 30% admit rate for legacies a bit shocking. What ever happened to meritocracy? I find Fitzsimmons' claims that "some Harvard parents hesitate to push their legacy kids" and "we don't want to admit kids who would be unhappy" to be a little disingenuous. I know some argue that legacy kids are just as qualified as other admits, but why should they get what Fitzsimmons calls a "tip" that separates them from so many other equally qualified kids? It probably does come down to buying alumni support. Maybe this discussion belongs on the college thread, though.

(And before the inevitable attack comes my way:  it's not sour grapes, because my DC got into an ivy without any hooks, despite being a legacy at a different ivy.)[/quote]

I would like to see a study that compared the Harvard/Ivies legacy applicant pool to the non-legacy applicant pool using some sort of quantifiable metric -- I guess SATs is what there is, as school GPAs vary so wildly.  (Such studies might be out there, would love to see them if somebody has a link.)  From observation only (so this is not statistically valid), the legacy kids who get in from our school are also often superlative students (National Merit Scholarship Finalists) who get into non-legacy schools as well (I'm thinking of a student who won a Morehead Scholarship, pretty stunning pool of winners, who attended the Ivy at which the student was a legacy, or a student who is a Presidential Scholar, also a pretty stunning pool, who attended the Ivy at which the student is a legacy).  I remember from my own college days some rather dimmer bulbs from august (and robustly donating) legacy families, so maybe the overall numbers of the legacy pool are not that impressive -- but I'd like to see the numbers.[/quote]

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