Legacy admissions is a policy that grants preferences to the children of alumni. The policy has been particularly important in the Ivy League and other elite, private schools. The logic has been that children of alumni may be among the most eager applicants, as they have learned a lot about a school literally at their parent’s knee. In addition, legacy admissions is a sort of business strategy. At these private, elite universities, alumni represent a huge chunk of the donors who regularly and generously give to the college.  It makes sense, from a business perspective, to cultivate these donors with the abstract promise that their children will be given special consideration when they eventually (inevitably?) apply for admission. It also makes sense that satisfied parents who see their progeny running around the campus of their alma mater will continue to give–and perhaps give so that their grandchildren, too, might be given the same sorts of preferences.

Legacy admissions is all about perpetuating the American elite

The thing to remember is that not so long ago, the Ivy League schools and the other private, elite schools of the east coast really were just for the elite.  That is to say, the rich and powerful. While most of these schools had admissions tests of some kind, the fact was that kids from families who were neither rich nor connected to the powerful had little chance to get in. And when some people, like Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan began to “crack the code” and be accepted in greater numbers, these schools just changed their admissions policies to protect the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite and keep the Jews out (the best presentation of the evolution of admissions policies in the Ivy League is Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen:  The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton).

While many thanks have changed in the admissions offices in the Ivy League–especially since the advent of affirmative action policies–legacy admissions have remained an important part of the Ivy League and other elite, private colleges and universities. We might also want to keep some perspective.  Back in 1980, 24% of Yale’s freshman class were legacies.  In 2014, the percentage had dropped to only 13%. Of course, 13% is still significant:  about 216 students out of 1660 in the first year class.  But it ain’t what it used to be. And ironically, what forced that relative decline in the percentage of legacy students, in many respects, is the policy that the Supreme Court has just rejected:  affirmative action.

Legacy admission is not just for white people anymore

At most of the Ivy League schools and at many other elite, private colleges, white people are now in the minority. And many minorities have passed through the halls of these schools over the past 40-50 years, such that their children now have that legacy preference. I recently attended my Dartmouth reunion, and met quite a few folks–of a variety of ethnicities–who had children who had graduated from Dartmouth.

The fact is, legacy admission is still about perpetuating the elite.  But thanks to other sorts of admissions policies, including affirmative action, Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous people also are benefitting from legacy admissions. It is not a racist policy.  It is a business-oriented policy that is protective of the interests of the community that the private institution serves.

This may all seem unsavory, but legacy admission is not the same thing as affirmative action.  Legacy admission–in the first quarter of the twenty-first century–is an institutional preference that is not at all based on race…at least not anymore.

Legacy admission vs. wealth as a path to entry

According to a 2023 study by some Harvard researchers, the real boost for admission is not legacy status, but wealth. Raj Chetty (who has done a lot to dispel myths about how higher education really works in this country) and his colleagues have shown that more than any other factor, wealth of the student’s family is the best predictor of admission.

Money talks. The rich have more access.

This is no surprise.

However, I have been surprised by the “surprise” that so many have expressed when they have discovered that families in the top one-percent of have a better chance of admission.  This is just the elite replicating itself, once again.

Legacy admissions and “yield”

Since the rise of the US News rankings in 1983, colleges have been increasingly protective of their “yield rate:”  the percentage of offers of admission that are accepted by their recipients.  Harvard has a high yield rate that hovers around 80-85%.  Other universities have a low yield rate: lots of kids apply but few really want to go there.

US News tracks this as part of the rankings:  the higher the yield rate, the “better” the college. The fact is that even at not-so-selective schools, children of alumni have a higher propensity to accept an offer of admission than a kids whose parents did not attend.  And what is true at the not-so-selective schools is also true at the very selective schools.

However, some of this link between yield and legacy has disappeared, as the Ivies have tended to show a clear preference to admit legacies in the Early Decision round–when the nominal yield rate is already 100 percent. The University of Pennsylvania used to make it quite clear–on their admissions website–that legacies would need to apply ED if they wanted the legacy “bump” in admissions. Interestingly, such language no longer exists on the Penn website.

Because of this important link between legacy status and yield, we may find that some of the less selective schools may hang on to legacy preferences (either by public pronouncement or more likely by quiet maintenance of the status quo), even as some of the most selective schools abandon them (definitely with great fanfare and a public relations campaign to match).

The future of legacy admissions

What will happen to legacy admission policies in light of the Supreme Court ruling eliminating affirmative action?  Already there is another court case against Harvard pressing for the elimination of legacy admission.

Already a few highly selective, private colleges have eliminated legacy preferences:  Wesleyan University, Amherst College, Johns Hopkins University, and Carnegie Mellon University have been among the first to strike the preferences. A few public universities have done away with it, too, but legacy admission was never as important at public universities as at the elite private schools, and these enrollments were never tracked quite as carefully, as lots of Michiganders who attended the University of Michigan have kids who also attended, and many a loyal UT-Austin family have struck up rivalries with neighbors whose families are loyal Aggies.

My sense is that it will be harder for the Supreme Court to strike down a business practice that is not discriminating by race–but by wealth and income or the ability to donate.  If children of Black alumni get the same preference as kids of White or Asian alumni, then it may be more difficult for SCOTUS to consider this a discriminatory policy except on the issue of ability to pay.

Still, colleges and universities that still cling to legacy admissions policies are on notice that the public at large is not all that happy with those preferences.  Kids on campuses are protesting against these policies. It’s hard for Boards of Trustees to defend the policies in this political climate.

Then again, one of the reasons why parents are willing to shell out so much money to pay full price for these elite schools is the “connections” they will make with the movers and shakers of America.  Every family wants their kids to attend school with kids whose names are Rockefeller, Kennedy, Bush, or Clinton. They know that what they are paying for is not so much a classroom education where one learns from particularly brilliant professors. Rather, they are paying for access to the elite of America. And some of that elite is, indeed, the aristocratic families of this country (which formally has no aristocracy). Doing away with legacy admissions altogether could fundamentally change the Ivies.  And if getting into an Ivy were purely based on academic merit alone, would anyone really want to go to school with a bunch brilliant people who had no access to the elite, who had no social or financial capital at their fingertips, who could not make a few phone calls and open doors to power and influence?

I’m not defending the practice.  But two questions bear consideration.

First, can a private institution decide whom it will serve–as long as it is not discriminating on the basis of race or otherwise violating the law? We do allow, for instance, some schools not to accept students of a particular gender (yes, Wellesley, I’m looking at you). Some colleges (Liberty, Bob Jones) discriminate on the basis of religion:  you gotta toe the doctrinal line if you want to attend some schools.  SCOTUS also has indicated that businesses can refuse service to particular people on the basis of their religious beliefs.  Country clubs can decide not to admit someone, and they don’t have to give a reason for the rejection.  Even Rotary Clubs and Elks Clubs and Lions Clubs–as private entities–are under no obligation to accept someone for membership–as long as they are not breaking any anti-discrimination laws.  Therefore, to what degree can colleges be free to set their own admissions policies, popular opinion be damned?

Second, if legacy preferences were entirely eliminated, along with all other non-academic, non-merit factors in admission (including the wealth of the family), would these institutions have the allure that they do now?  We all cannot be rich, but maybe we can rub shoulders with them?  We can’t all be from American dynastic families, but maybe we can hang out and drink beer with them, and maybe have one as a lab partner? If admission to the top private universities were simply a matter of academic merit alone, would everyone still want to go to them?

Does it help to be a legacy when applying to college?

Sure, it helps to be a legacy if you’re applying to the college to which your parents attended–if you’re applying to one of those schools that still exercises legacy preferences.  At least as so far as we know, right now.

But it also helps if you’re an athlete.

It also helps if you’re a musician.

It also helps if you’re an artist.

It also helps if you want to study Portuguese and the college is desperately looking for students to fill Portuguese classes.

And by God, it definitely, incontrovertibly helps if your parents can shell out the full price for the cost of four years of tuition, room, board, fees, and beer money.

You get the idea. Being a legacy is just one hook amongst many when it comes to applying to college. And that hook may be disappearing. Or it may not.

But being a legacy at the top Ivies, aka, “the holy trinity” – Harvard, Yale, Princeton) – isn’t what it used to be.

And it may be that the preference will go away altogether.

Wondering if your legacy status will help you get admitted?

If you want to chat about the possibilities and the pitfalls of exercising your legacy status, give us a call.  There is no right or wrong answer to this question–at least not at the moment. What you need to do is examine your goals, your preferences, and your own moral compass.  We can help you sort through the issues to come up with your own approach.  So don’t hesitate to give us a call or contact us on our website.

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Sadly, there is very little research to indicate how much you could expect to earn after gaining a degree from this, that, or the other college. We do have statistics reports of averages. This one at Payscale.com is an example. But an average is not a prediction of what your son or daughter will make upon graduation. About half the kids make more than that. And half make less. Which will be your child? Above or below the average?

Even with salary averages by college, educational ROI would not be predictive for an individual student. An average is an average, after all, and how could we predict that Susie would earn above the average and that Sam would earn below that average? (Unless, of course, Susie were from Lake Wobegon…where all the children are above average…).

Plus there are kids at cheaper schools that make way more than the averages for those expensive private schools. Who made the better bet: the kid who paid less for college, or the one who paid more?

The fact is that aggregate data is unhelpful in providing clear guidance to individual high school graduates. Would you buy a Harvard degree if you were destined to earn below the salary average for that institution? What crystal ball will tell us where we will end up five, ten, or twenty-five years after graduation?

The reason for the dearth of the sort of solid research for which we all pine is that it cannot be done. Solid, scientific, and predictive research requires double-blind experiments with variables that can be controlled. When it comes to educational ROI, such controlled experiments would be impossible.

Why? Because human beings are darned complex, and too many uncontrollable variables enter the equation. What are the variables that have an impact on one’s financial success in life (other than the name of the university on one’s diploma)?

Let’s start a list.

• Educational background prior to entering college (e.g., Philips Exeter vs PS 142)
• Socio-economic status prior to entering college (e.g., New England blueblood vs. first-generation Sudanese)
• Grades earned in college (e.g., a studious 3.5 GPA or a slacker 2.4
• Major in college (e.g., engineering vs. education)
• Location a person chooses to live in after college (e.g., Santa Barbara vs. Omaha)
• The type of profession one seeks (e.g., teacher vs. neurosurgeon)
• Other skills a student develops beyond the major (e.g., the philosophy major who also studies organic chemistry)
• Jobs or internships the student might have had during college (e.g., dishing ice cream on Cape Cod vs. doing an accounting gig with PriceWaterhouseCoopers)
• Absence or presence of well-connected family members (e.g., a mom who CEO of Acme Technology and raised gobs of dough for a presidential campaign vs. a dad who drives a cab in Brooklyn)

Get the picture? Controlling for all these variables so that we could develop a scientific study that gave us meaningful comparisons to help us predict educational ROI for a particular student is virtually impossible. No aspiring academic with an understanding of research methodology would take this on.

But the biggest problem is that we can never compare a single kid who had two lives one in which he went to a high-priced college and one in which he went to a community college and later transferred to the state school.

Or the student who majored in business in his first life and then majored in English in his second.

Or the student who earned good grades in his first life, and then floated by with a C-average in his second.

Now, if we could clone people and set the clones off in two different directions that would be really cool. And conclusive. We could see which genetically identical person earned the most after having attended this school or the other. As long as those genetically identical individuals had lived identical lives in the same household to the age of 18 (if, however, the clones were “separated at birth,” we’d see our research devolve into the nature vs. nurture morass).

The fact is, folks, that we all want to be able to scientifically tote up the numbers to come up with a predictive return on our educational investment.

Can’t be done.

So we’re left with a silly, vapid argument between those who say “spend the money” and those who say “save your money.” Both are right.  Both are wrong. The argument gets us nowhere.

Fundamental principles we can consider in making the decision

Still, might there be some fundamental principles we can consider in making the decision about whether to spend tons of money on a college education? Let’s see if we can’t come up with some.

1.  How big an investment is the price tag, relative to current family income? Some can easily afford a quarter of a million dollars for an education. Some cannot. So if you have the money, it’s worth it. If you don’t have it, it’s not worth it. (Remember Aesop’s fable of the “Fox and the Grapes”?). Hmmm…this is not a very satisfying fundamental principle. Next!

2.  Will you have to go into debt to finance this expensive degree? The bigger the debt burden, the less likely the return on the investment will cancel out that debt. Then again, it depends on what you end up doing after that degree. If you’re a brain surgeon or a successful venture capitalist, then who cares? You’ll be able to pay off that debt in the blink of an eye. But if you become a teacher or an unsuccessful venture capitalist, then clearly the investment wasn’t worth it. But notice: you can’t know whether the investment was worth it until AFTER you have a successful–or unsuccessful career! This is getting frustrating, isn’t it?

3.  Speaking of which, your professional aspirations do play a role. If you plan to be a kindergarten teacher or an orchestral musician, then spending a quarter of a million bucks for an education isn’t worth it. However, if you want to be a brain surgeon, you have no choice but to go to college…and then go into debt for medical school. But here’s a contrarian thought: do you have to go to college to be a successful business executive?

Not necessarily, of course (we all know the story of Bill Gates, for whom Harvard “wasn’t worth it”). To go a step further, do you really have to go to college at all to make a lot of money? I have a cousin who went to school to learn how to do auto body work. He can now buy and sell me several times over, sends his kids to elite private schools, drives a brand new Mercedes, and has a vacation home in Vermont. Where did I go wrong….?

4.  Savvy shoppers for educational services should do some price comparisons. But the fact is that very few students pay the actual tuition sticker price. You see, because of the way financial aid (both merit-based and need-based) is allocated, each individual pays a different price for that education–especially at the colleges with heavy price tags.

So here again we have another variable for which we much provide some scientific control in our research: we need to compare students who paid full price or students who received a full scholarship. Or half a scholarship. Or something. (Oh my:  not another variable for which we need a control!)

5.  There are aspects of education that do not boil down to dollars and cents. For some, education is not merely about preparing for a profession. For some, it’s also about intellectual inquiry–pushing your capacities to the limit. There is a spiritual element to education that transcends a “market price.” This is all well and good: but it certainly doesn’t get us any closer to calculating our educational ROI. To do a calculation, we need numbers, and these folks who find an intrinsic value in education just aren’t numbers people.

The fact is that the argument as to whether or not an expensive private education is “worth it” simply cannot be won. The argument isn’t really an argument: it all boils down to one’s personal values and preferences.

Can people who go to state universities have satisfying, successful careers?

You bet. Can Ivy League graduates end up earning less than $40k per year for the past 25 years? You bet (I have a Dartmouth friend who is a respected ornithologist who lives in the Amazon, has discovered many new species, and has never made more than $40k in a year: was his Ivy League investment “worth it”?).

Advice on the worth of an expensive private college education

So in the absence of research, we need a crystal ball. Or we need good, solid, personalized advice from someone who can help a family identify their priorities. Perhaps a professional guidance counselor who can help a student explore his or her academic strengths and weaknesses.

Who can discuss “educational philosophy” with a family to find out whether the educational priority is on “getting a job” or on “leading the examined life.” What it all amounts to is “different strokes for different folks.” My job is not to win an argument. My job is to figure out which stroke you’re swimming and help keep you moving in your chosen direction.

Great College Advice

The post Is An Expensive Private College Education Worth the Money? first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

As a response, many high schools have instituted community service requirements for graduation.  Similarly, one of the main attractions of the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum is its emphasis on community action through its CAS program (“Creativity, Action, Service).

Coincident with these trend is the rise of “voluntourism”, by which well-off adults travel to Africa or Latin America or Southeast Asia to do “good works” in a poor community during their vacations.  These programs also build upon similar efforts organized by churches and other religious organizations.  This demand has created a significant niche of the international travel industry that caters to altruistic adventures.

To grossly oversimplify, the idea is for folks in wealthy countries like the United States to see how others live and to contribute in some way to the development of a less well-off community. From the standpoint of college admissions, these sorts of “voluntourism” programs have become increasingly common.  Many affluent families routinely send their kids off on some sort of community service adventure to work in an orphanage, dig latrines, or paint school buildings in poverty-stricken communities around the world.  Invariably, these experiences become fodder for college essays.

From the admissions standpoint, these pay-to-play experiences are so common–and so superficial–that their impact in the admissions process is negligible.  Given that so many kids write about such experiences, the resulting essays can even become a strike against the student.  I’ve heard admissions officers crack jokes about the insipid essays that emanate from these international volunteer experiencs.

To give you an idea of the essays I’ve seen kids write about such experiences, I offer the following made-up example (warning: I am exaggerating for effect…):

“My life changed when I spent two weeks digging ditches in Upper Slobovia last summer.  I never knew that people who were so poor, who ate bugs for dinner, and who used a tin can as a potty could be so happy and generous.  These unfortunate people taught me so much about life: especially, how lucky I am not to be one of them.”

Obviously, I’m not really a fan of these “voluntourism” programs.  I studied international relations in graduate school, and spent a good deal of my time thinking about poverty alleviation in developing countries.  I also have many very close friends who spent years of their lives doing “real” development work, living in hardship in places like Guyana, Malawi, and Laos, actually delivering well-developed, well-funded development aid.  And many of these friends will confide that they were never too sure that their efforts really amounted to much.  So how could a teen with a shovel actually do any real and lasting good during a two week drive-by trip to the Dominican Republic?

Actually, these teens could be doing do more harm than good.  A recent article published on Al-Jazeera America caught my eye.  It highlights the growing demand in the rich world for altruistic vacation opportunities.  Both in the teen and adult markets, scads of companies have cropped up to feed this demand, and more and more rich white folks are traveling to poor places where the dominant skin tones are several shades darker.

The overall tone of the article is fairly critical of “voluntourism” The author cites several egregious examples of voluntourism gone wrong in South Africa and Haiti and elsewhere.  However, the author does soften the critique a bit by saying that such volunteer experiences abroad can be improved through due diligence, better awareness, and a more realistic attitude on the part of the tourists that what they are doing can have negative as well as positive consequences for a community.

When asked by parents whether such volunteer opportunities for teens are really worth it, I tell them that they have become virtually worthless in the admissions process. The only people who can really go are those who can afford to fly to Timbuktu and back again.  Colleges might actually prefer to hear from applicants who have done something significant and important in their own local communities.  Certainly, such efforts may lack the “wow!” appeal of teaching English to kids in South Sudan, but what colleges want to see  is an activity that has a measurable impact–and not the experience that took place that even Google Maps cannot find.

To be fair, I have had a small handful of kids write excellent, reflective, and balanced essays on their time abroad as volunteers.  Generally, the best ones are written by kids who spend four or more weeks in a community, during which time they actually begin to see beyond the superficial level of what poverty means, and begin to connect with people in a more interesting and fundamental way.  Not all “voluntourism” is horrible.

But don’t latch on to such opportunities as the quick way into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale.  These universities will be much more impressed your impact, your capacity for reflection, and your intellectual and personal curiosity much more than the stamps in your passport.

Great College Advice

The post The Dark Underside of Community Service in the Quest for College Admission first appeared on College Admission Counseling.

Columbia and Harvard saw small decreases in applications, too, while the others (Cornell, Yale, Princeton, and Brown) had modest gains in their application numbers.
Why does this happen from year to year?  Hard to know.  UPenn credits its partnership with KIPP charter schools for at least part of the increase:  more applicants applied for application fee waivers than ever before.

Dartmouth’s precipitous drop may be due to a lot of factors, including ending the practice of accepting AP (Advanced Placement) courses for credit, its lousy publicity in recent months, and the continued dominance of the fraternity system in campus social life. The director of admission, Maria Laskaris, is leading an analysis of the reasons for the decline.
Whether winners or loser, we can expect that overall it will continue to be more and more difficult to get into the Ivy League in coming years.

Great College Advice

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With the exception of Dartmouth, which saw a decrease in its applications of ~12.5% (which we hypothesize is due to the relatively recent bad press that the school received about its Greek life), and Cornell, who has not reported final numbers, yet, the balance of the Ivy League schools saw an increase in early applications over last year.  Harvard, for example, reported a whopping 15% more applications for the Class of 2017 than for the Class of 2016.  Other highly selective schools such as MIT (up 9%) and Northwestern (up 7%) also saw a significant increase in their early application numbers year over year.

While many schools haven’t reported their early results, here is a chart that we pulled together to give you a flavor of what’s been happening out there.  It details selected highly competitive schools and their early admissions acceptance rates.  If you follow overall admissions rates at these types of schools, you’ll see that the Early Admit Rates noted below are significantly higher than each school’s historic overall admit rates.

In doing my research, I also noted that a number of the schools deferred a significant portion of their early applicants to the Regular Decision pool.  Yale, for example, deferred over 55% of its early applicants, Brown seems to have deferred around 70% and Dartmouth 35%.  Anecdotally, it seems that MIT has also deferred a tremendous number of its applicants, but we don’t have any firm numbers.
These deferral numbers indicate that the schools are getting early applications from large numbers of qualified candidates, and the schools are not prepared to say “no” until they see what the Regular Decision pool brings.  Still, the schools are also not prepared to say “yes” to these applicants, either, and historically, the number of deferred applicants who ultimately get admitted are few.
The schools that offer an Early Decision plan seem to be filling an unbelievable 40%+ of their freshman class from their early applications.  This means that students who apply Regular Decision to these very selective schools will have an even tougher go of it simply because there are fewer slots to fill.  A while ago, I wrote a blog post trying to answer the question:  Is it easier to get in if you apply early?  Many of the points in that post are relevant here.  Essentially, early applicants most definitely benefit from indicating that a school is their top pick and applying early, but only if the candidate meets the admissions standards of the school in the first place.
The sad part about this current situation is that because qualified students appear to have an advantage if they apply early to these highly competitive institutions, candidates are using early application plans as a strategy to gain admission, even if they are not sure that a given school is actually where they want or ought to go.  Especially if they apply as part of a binding ED program, then whether they are sure or not, if they get in, that’s where they will have to go.  These dynamics are forcing students to make their decisions about college several months earlier in their high schools careers when, perhaps, they haven’t had time to fully explore their options and figure out what is best for them.
The lesson is that if students believe that they might be interested in applying to highly selective schools, they should start their research early.  Applying early can be advantageous, but don’t apply early to a school simply because it is a name brand.  In doing so, other options might be shut out that would ultimately be more suitable.
Andrea Aronson
College Admissions Consultant
Westfield, NJ

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Unsurprisingly, students offered admission to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Pomona are accepting those offers at more or less the same rates as in years past. All of these schools have increased their financial aid budgets this year over last to ensure that yields stay constant.

But as Steinberg admits, only a small fraction of colleges have reported yield rates, and many colleges (including the likes of Georgetown) still have room in their freshman classes. The effects of the economic meltdown on college enrollments still remain to be seen, and we’re several weeks from having a full understanding of how the economy will affect both college budgets and the experience of the students who do matriculate.

Stay tuned.

Mark Montgomery
Independent College Consultant

May 11 UPDATE:  According to an article in today’s issue of The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s yield was 2% lower than last year, forcing the admissions office to pull 50-60 students off the wait list. This is not a huge decline, and probably something that would have made the news, were it not for the kooky economic situation.

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Not great odds. And yet, the odds have never been that great at Harvard and Yale.

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