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]OP - are the high school students you know mostly white?  Because one way of reading this post is that it reaffirms the recent Supreme Court decision - it’s become nearly impossible for white highly qualified high school students to get into Ivy League schools unless they are legacies or athletes.  [/quote]

[b]Probably. And many if not most of the legacies are going to be from connected families with parents who are prominent and accomplished. Major donors (no, your paltry $200 a year doesn't count), major cultural figures, heads of institutions, film directors, financial bigwigs. It's not your run of mill legacy applicant from a run of mill professional suburban family. [/b]

30 years ago legacy admissions wasn't so controversial because there was still plenty of room for non legacy, unhooked bright kids, who were the biggest demographics at the schools. But over the last 30 years the Ivies have hollowed out that demographic enormously in order to fit in all the quotas of other categories. Not just black or Latino, but "international" is now a significant presence the Ivies seek out. To make room for all of them while keeping the rich hooked legacies and the athletes, the unhooked suburban kids had to go bye bye. The Ivy student body is engineered to a degree today that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.

Banning legacy admissions won't change anything meaningfully. These kids will just go into the special admissions pile in a different form. The Ivies aren't giving up the children of the rich and powerful and connected. But banning affirmative action will affect the schools significantly and will see the % of Asian students go up noticeably, but in my view that is perfectly fine. That's merit, more like it was 30 years ago, except that more will be Asian.

OP here.  The 7 students that I know at Harvard and Princeton (and also the 2 at Cornell that I later remembered) are from UMC suburban families.  All but one of them are white.  Contrary to what the PP posted above, the parents (who themselves are graduates of Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell) are likely not major donors or bigwigs -- the parents are definitely successful and smart people who work hard and have good jobs, and they seem to live nice lives with some vacations.  But they are not anything extreme.

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