We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

To be fair, it's probably true that the admit rate for MIT legacy applicants is also higher than the overall admit rate. It's just that the MIT admissions committee doesn't consider legacy status in admissions. It's hard to separate correlation from causation in the admit rates.

I think there are a few more factors to consider to accurately account for any discrepancy. Early admission candidates have a 3 times greater acceptance rate generally. My guess is more legacy candidates apply early. 2. How many of these legacy candidates have buildings named after their family? Generally, for these families, 3-4 siblings will attend the same college. If 8% of the class is a legacy, would it be fair to assume 1% of these students have had families who have made large donations?

Back before college when I was still looking into different schools, I was at an event talking with a few other prospective students and someone who worked in admissions at Penn. One of the other prospective students mentioned that his grandfather went to Penn, and the admissions person proudly said that Penn was one of the few schools that took into account grandparents as well as immediate family for legacy applications. I was kind of surprised that giving an even larger group of people an undeserved advantage was viewed as something to be proud of, but I guess it goes with the territory.

I did end up going to Penn, although I was not a legacy student. In an ironic twist, I did not get into MIT, where my father went. I'm not complaining, though; if I was determined not to be worth a spot on my own merits, I'm glad that the spot was given to someone more qualified rather than given to me for reasons that ultimately have little to do with me.

That strikes me as being remarkably heavy handed given that these same schools seem to give even more advantage to non-Asian minorities (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences).

Many folks, especially HNers, seem to think that entrance to elite schools should be purely (or mostly) based on academic merit. Any school that would choose to do that would be shooting themselves in the foot in a number of ways. For example:

1. Athletics would suffer. Even in the athletically weak Ivy League, winning sports teams increase donations directly and indirectly as well as alumni involvement.

2. Pure merit admissions would negatively discriminate against many minority applicants for various reasons that are fairly well documented in research.

3. The social capital of the institution's graduates would suffer greatly. Elite schools tend to have a healthy mix of people who are great producers and people who are great facilitators based on their personal networks (e.g., rain making, getting funding, doing sales, etc.). These two groups do a good job of scratching each others' backs. If the ratio skews too far in one direction, the balance will be broken and both groups will be less effective.

For the most part, legacies either would get in anyway (i.e., without legacy preference), or they are filling in the mediocre parts of the each class while providing some sort of benefit to the school (e.g., strengthening alumni network, strengthening school community, school donations, propensity to encourage their potentially talented progeny to apply to the school, etc.).

I assure you that no highly talented applicant with an application that accurately represents them is losing a slot to an elite school based on a legacy (or an athlete, or a z-lister, or whatever) -- either they probably just aren't as talented or interesting as they (or their parents) think they are, or something went sideways with their application (e.g., recommendation writers not being skilled at writing high quality recommendations).

As I have said before in other replies on this topic, only 10-30% of an elite school's entering class is "interesting" based on my own personal definition of interesting (having one or more of: creativity, high capacity to learn and synthesize new ideas quickly, true leadership/charisma, etc.). These are all easy admits to any school they apply to -- no perceived strike like non-legacy will hold them back. The rest of each entering class looks remarkably similar and mediocre in comparison, and the admission committee has several vectors they need to consider when filling those slots. Legacy admissions is just one of those vectors, and I think it's a totally reasonable one given the other vectors that are also considered (e.g., affirmative action).

Some people seem to think that admissions to an elite school is a golden ticket, and that's a half truth. Elite schools definitely open doors that non-elite schools don't, but the benefit often ends there. The skilled/interesting folks take the opportunity and run with it, and the vast majority of others just fade into mediocrity.

This is a favorite topic of mine that I think is often misunderstood. I am happy to share what I know to folks who are interested, so please feel free to ask questions -- I will answer to the best of my ability.

Apologies for a reply that is a bit beyond the scope of your comment, but this is as good a spot as any in this thread to make this comment.

Source: Me. Attended and worked on admissions committees at two elite schools.

You won't find a list of college with legacy admissions because almost all private colleges do it.

> and drooling about what it means to go to a school like that.

As someone who bummed around the high levels of the academy for years as research staff, let me tell you what it means. It means lots of stress (and has been described as drinking from a firehose), and lots of ego, and a more prestigious brand associated with your diploma, exactly comparable to having a Gucci purse instead of one from Banana Republic. It does not mean more capable students, more capable faculty, or better resources for an individual undergraduate.

Studentry plateaus in intelligence and ability at the level of a decent state university. Faculty plateaus at a lower level of prestige than that. The prestige is useful for only two things: marrying into privilege and getting jobs with certain prestigious firms in management consulting and finance. If neither is important to you, then there is no reason to spend $180k on MIT instead of $60k to $80k on your state school. Or $5k on four years of tuition at the EPFL in Switzerland, which is as prestigious as MIT or Caltech. (Numbers are tuition and fees, but not cost of living, for four years. State universities are in-state tuition. EPFL is international student tuition.)

And if you're interested in engineering and lucky enough to live in California, Georgia, Colorado, or Alabama, you have a state university that, in engineering, is more prestigious than MIT.

Do you have any support for these accusations? These are bold claims.

I have been at Ivies in some capacity in each of those decades. There have been "average at best" folks in each of those decades.

While the "average at best" folks may have increased in proportion to above average folks (something I am not sure I agree with), I think it may have more to do with the admissions process being more transparent with the rise in popularity of the Internet than it was pre-internet.

My personal and anecdotal take is that I have seen an increase in the proportion of tryhard bookworms who lack creativity, leadership skills, and/or raw intellectual power. I am not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing (these folks make great worker bees), but their proportion in the student body needs to be balanced with folks with other strengths like those mentioned above.

I think that's only in the tech world, because I once came upon a "legacy senior home" and none of my (non-tech) friends found it as amusing. Apparently there are plenty of senior homes with legacy in their names.

It's only in tech that we disparage the means that brought us to our current success.

This has been sort of done with Charter schools that use a lottery based acceptance system.

The problem with even random systems is that parents that are willing to fill out the many forms required are usually more involved in their children's life then the median in poor communities.

Also - many charter schools don't provide federally funded free lunches which means that the poorest students who rely on these lunches are unable to attend these schools.

The survivorship bias is kind of the point. An employer can't administer an IQ test, but they can hire from MIT or Stanford. They can't pull employees from the good old boy's network, but they can recruit from Harvard.

> MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways.

This is true, but there's a lot of value in being surrounded by peers who are at your level or a little better who push you to become better than you would otherwise.

> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways.

Ignore this person, they don't know what they are talking about.

For better or worse, the 'elite' schools have money. That means they can hire teaching-track professors. These are professors whose sole job is to teach and advise (i.e., they don't spend all their time doing research). And they do a really good job at it. Much better than overworked professor that is more focused about research and grants.

Edit: People are conflating "teaching" versus "research" professors, so I want to provide an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS50

This course is taught by David Malan. He has dedicated a lot of his life to this course to make it be awesome. The reason why he can do this is because he is a teaching professor. If you look at his CV, you will see that he does not have any PhD students. His main job is to teach undergrads at Harvard and he can put more of his time to it than a professor that has to also worry about research. He doesn't bring the university as much money because he's not writing research grants, but they can still afford to keep him around. This is the point that I was trying to make.

>1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] > 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area).

True, but there's nothing MIT can do about it except stop being MIT.

At MIT, freshman calculus (if you didn't AP out of it - which you need a 5 on the BC to do) is not one year, but one semester. Multivariate calculus is also one semester, and if you're not done with it by the end of freshman year, you're not likely to graduate.

Yes, it's unfair. But it's not MIT's fault.

> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways

I strongly suspect you are not in a position to provide empirical backup to that assertion.

you are of course right but unfortunately good teachers don't scale.

my oldest is in 2nd grade Success Academy in brooklyn, they actually do lottery ( there is even a documentary about them on Netflix called the lottery)

in my view there is only one thing that allow kids to do well in school and that is parents who care.

once my son reaches 4th or 5th we are going to send him to a private school, cause thats when it starts to matter if they want to go the educational route.

to be honest though short of getting the most fundamental skills like reading and math and music i am kind of hoping he will just educate himself with things he care about his whole life.

there is something not very futureproof of sending your kid into an educational system that teaches everyone the same while expecing them to stand out.

i managed to do quite well for myself and i am mostly autodidact, but its hard to know if i was just lucky.

bottom line is you cant make the right decisions for your kids.

Here's the reality. My uncle taught at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn in the 90s. He had a class section with 90 students, which sounds crazy except that he met 30 and regularly saw 9.

One kid was selling crack. Another held him at knifepoint over a Twinkie. The rest were either there for lunch or just trying to scrape by, living in terror.

Those kids sent going to function at MIT.

> High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented.

It goes further back than that. I went to one of those high schools - certain middle schools are disproportionately represented because those middle schools can prepare students better for the exams. (I didn't attend one of those middle schools, so I can't comment on the presence of feeder elementary schools and feeder preschools, but one can imagine...).

I worked at a private K-12 school overseas for a few years which was brutally competitive. We would very excitedly publish our excellent college admissions results and would always be featured prominently in lists ranking private schools in the city and the country.

The dirty little secret is that only about 70% of kids who enrolled in the first-year of the HS would actually graduate from the school. I do think the teachers we had were excellent and did a phenomenal job, but the school was designed to be impossibly difficult. The thing is, with the high reputation, the spots made available by these kids were easily filled by families wanting to send their kids in. It created a nice self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyone who has looked at school (K-12 or universities) carefully and is being honest with themselves, this sort of selection -- in all the many forms it takes -- is the real driving force behind the difference in outcomes observed in student's life-paths post-graduation.

Ah, Stuyvesant. I have fond memories of competing against them in regional/national Speech & Debate tournaments. Great school.

Incidentally, if you want another metric that makes the Ivies jump over themselves to admit students, it's placing in basically any extracurricular contest/tournament they sponsor or host. For example, placing in the top six at Harvard Nationals for Speech & Debate essentially guarantees you admission if you have decent grades. For some categories, this is less difficult than you'd think.

That said, two of the most intelligent people I have ever known placed in Harvard Nationals and later went to the school. I can't speak empirically to the correlation vs causation of placing in these sorts of tournaments, but I think those two in particular could have gone to any school they wanted. One was a student at Stuyvesant.

On the other hand, I also knew someone who was a concert pianist in addition to a nationally ranked Speech & Debate competitor. He also had excellent grades and was admitted to five Ivies and MIT. I don't think he applied to any safety schools. He was someone I would consider extremely capable in the sense of time management and executive functioning, but in raw intellectual capacity (such as critical thinking), he never stood out to me.

But I could be mistaken in these value judgements. It's hard to even define intelligence rigorously. I think that's part of the problem with these discussions. How do we qualify intelligence, then set out to design a meritocracy that controls for the nature (having intelligent parents) component of intelligence, if we can only limit the nurture aspects (socioeconomic and parenting)?

Some of the schools you mentioned, such as Stuyvesant, have an extremely competitive (and meritocratic) admissions process. The fact that Stuyvesant sends a lot of students to MIT, is just as logical as Stanford sending a lot of its undergrads to MIT's grad school. In fact, given how socioeconomically diverse schools like Stuyvesant are, their representation at the elite universities is actually a good sign.

https://outlookzen.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/481/

Really the reason you want to go to an "elite" university is for two things: networking and opportunity. Teaching quality will average out over any reasonably good university. Research quality is totally different, but doesn't matter much as an undergrad unless you get lucky with your dissertation supervisor. At my university our dissertation choices were essentially random, though you could specify your top three.

Opportunity? The best universities can afford to ship in TED-class speakers every week, you get an instant boost in job applications and some companies directly headhunt the best students. Shedloads of funding means world class sports facilities, heavily subsidised student societies and entertainment. Depending where you go, you can hobnob with people who are highly likely to be successful [1] if that's an area you want to go into.

This is, I think, subtly different from top high schools. The difference there is that often the teaching is significantly better than at state/public funded schools. On top of that you have the opportunities that those schools can afford.

I'm not disagreeing that this is elitism, but that teaching quality should probably be a middling priority for most people.

[1] The classic example is PPE at Oxford: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford...

> If students know their children will probably be studying in the same college they have an incentive do things to make that college better in all respects.

The downside to this is that legacy students have less incentive to work hard in high school if they know they are guaranteed admission into an elite school.

Speaking based on my experience at Columbia, it's not broadcasted and I don't think the instructors tend to know, but snarky comments will definitely be made if you're doing badly and a legacy

It's a weird system, in Australia we all get a standard score on leaving high school and if your score is higher than the next person choosing your degree preference you win the spot. Different for medicine only AFAIK.