Legacy Questions

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@CameronBameron1748 answers, 7213 votes

• just now

The concept of legacy admission didn't start with the Ivies. In England, Oxford and Cambridge are 1000 and 800 years old. In British society, your status is and will continue to be more important than how much money you have or your grades/test scores. So to gain admittance to such schools, you first had to go to a boarding school like Eton or Harrow which are today still in existence as boys only private schools.

Throughout history, noble families from the UK and around the world sent their entitled young men to these schools for the opportunity to gain admittance to Oxford and Cambridge. I'm certain these practices carried over to the 1st American college which was Harvard University.

Why? John Harvard studied at Emmanuel College at Cambridge prior to emigrating to the US in the 1637 after earning his Masters degree in 1635. He formed a relationship with Harvard as soon as he arrived. He must have know he was terminally ill with Tuberculosis because prior to his death a year later in 1638, he bequeathed 1/2 of his estate and 400 books to Harvard and the rest to his wife who lived to age 41.

During the first years at Harvard, your Class Rank was not based on your grades, or gpa or anything of the sort. It was based on your social clout. So if you were the son of the Governor of Massachusetts or someone with ties to the British royalty, you were up there in rank.

One could argue, albeit it being a very week argument, that since America in 2022 doesn't have a Royal family or a Caste system, that Insta and TikTok influencers with 10 million followers are socially and upwardly mobile and a proxy for royalty, not dissimilar to a college admissions system built on the foundation of nepotism. So the fact that applicants like Olivia Jade and her sister Bella as well as others well connected social climbers in the Varsity Blues Sting operation paid $500,000 or more to gain access to elite college through connections, would not cause an College Provost to flinch or bat and eyelid 400 years ago.

I'm glad to say that Harvard only used this system for a short number of years.

Harvard later changed by ranking students by their grades and accomplishments.

So when you ask why legacy matters to the Ivy League, it's because their whole concept of higher education is predicated on it.

These days there are 2 diametrically different forces which are shaping the class makeup of Ivy League and Elite and Top Liberal arts colleges.

1. ALDCs- Recruited Athletes, Legacies, Development Candidates ($$$ donors), and faculty children (facbrats). Being an ALDC may up your chances of getting in by a factor or 3x, 5x or more depending on how important and coveted an applicant your matriculation represents. And in that group is a VIP category that is not really talked about because not to many applicants are Hollywood super stars, Grammy winning recording artists, Nobel Peace Price nominees and Netflix stars, or Viral Activists like David Hogg (famous for getting into Harvard for a 1200 something SAT).

2. BIPOC, Low income, marginalized groups (queer, trans, disabled), first generation applicants. BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous Person of Color. You have to add LatinA as well since there is low representation of Hispanics at Ivies. Ivy's like Harvard are permitted to use race, and other attributes to give a leg up to certain applicants that otherwise may fall short of the 50% percentile standards. This means that Harvard and other Ivys, Elites, LACs, can USE 1 set of criteria for over-represented minorities and White Applicants, and completely different lower set for those who are from an under-represented groups. So if you are both LatinA, and poor, and first generation, and trans, you have 4 different hooks that will serve you well in the college admissions process.

In summary this is why if you are East Asian or White, and not an ALDC, you may need a 1550 SAT, 35 SAT, 10 APs, top ECs, awesome essays and recommendations while someone who is a hooked applicant might get away with a 1350 SAT, 30 ACT, 3 APs, limited ECs etc because Harvard will fight to have these distinct groups shaped into their incoming freshman class.

So when you watch YouTube college admissions reactions and stats videos, they are all over the place. And I think this is both damaging and naive to spread the misleading narratives to the general population. The hooked applicants are saying test scores don't matter because in their own experience, their SAT score was 200 points short of the standard or 5 ACT points short of the standard. I think they are in denial that being under-represented got them in more than anything in their Common or Coalition app that proved they deserved to be there. And on the opposite end of the spectrum you have literally hundreds of Chinese kids sharing their 99.+% percentile test scores, 12-15 APs, award winning essays and leadership roles, honors and awards, that reinforces the myth that Ivies are impossible to get into. Context is everything.

This year the Supreme Court is going to hear the Harvard lawsuit case and it will be interesting to learn how they will vote on either allowing Harvard to continue the practices of using Race or making them stop and no longer considering race.

Hope this was helpful to your understanding. Until some rich billionaire decides to start up their own Elite college that has equitable admissions practices, preferential and biased admissions policies shall continue. To date only MIT, Caltech and Amherst College do not consider "legacies" in their admissions process. I personally think it will be very slow process for colleges to give up this practice because it does have a huge ripple effect on the $$$$ Endowment pipeline going forward for these schools.