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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.

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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.

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.

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