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Comment by pesenti | Hacker News Reader

Compare that to most of the Ivy League: " In 2009, Princeton admitted 41.7% of legacy applicants—more than 4.5 times the 9.2% rate of non-legacies. Similarly, in 2006, Brown University admitted 33.5% of alumni children, significantly higher than the 13.8% overall admissions rate. In 2003, Harvard admitted 40% of legacy applicants, compared to the overall 11% acceptance rate. In short, Ivy League and other top schools typically admit legacies at two to five times their overall admission rates." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

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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.

Really? Seems pretty easy to analyze. Just take legacy applicants and their non-legacy equivalents and see the admittance rates.

If ability has a strong genetic component, one would expect a higher acceptance of legacy students.

Even if ability has a strong nurture component, one would expect the same.

Difficult to do if you aren't even tracking what applications are legacy in the first place, they'd at least have to ask a sample of admitted and rejected students post facto.

Ah. I assumed in this scenario we had some mechanism to determine who is a legacy applicant (or not). You make a good point.

But these instututions explicitly have a preference for legacy applications, so we don't really need to work backwards from the correlation to the cause. They're telling us that they give preferential treatment to legacy applicants.

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.

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?

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