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Comment by plandis | Hacker News Reader

Last time I checked it was either Harvard or Yale that admitted about 30% of legacy students but only single digit percentages for regular people — so to some extent you are right.

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That is for undergrad, and it's worth noting that the average test scores of an admitted legacy student > the average score for all admitted students.

Yield calculations have a lot to do with legacy admission rates.

Are you saying legacy's have an ABSURDLY higher average test score? Could you share a source on that? To explain a 30% gap in outcomes for two demographics solely by test scores would mean the test score difference is absolutely insane.

I'll try to find a source for that, it's somewhere in the SFFA trial documents but I'll need to go back and look.

But to be clear: I'm not trying to claim that there is no legacy preference and that it can be all explained by test scores. It is definitely a big factor.

The only two points I was making is that 1. traditional "legacy" admissions is not necessarily the route that a lot of students without any merit are getting into these top schools - they often have separate pathways for donors and super elite individuals, like Harvard's "z-list."

2. Legacy admissions are because schools know that if they admit more legacy, they will get more donations - but it also has to do with calculations about selectivity. Harvard wants to maximize the chances that the people it admits will choose Harvard so that they don't have to admit more people to fill the class thus raising the admission rate.

Someone said "these schools admit 30% more legacies than peasants" and you said "yeah, but legacies get better test scores than the peasants."

And your clarifications really don't address that, and you even seem to back away from it now. Why even make the absurd claim about the intellectual and test-taking superiority of legacies over the peasants if it isn't significant - as you're now claiming?

You're the first person to use the word "peasants" to refer to non-legacy applicants and I in no way think there is some sort of "intellectual" superiority or elite class of people in the US (well, economic elite - but not intellectual).

All I wanted to clarify is that these legacy processes only really come into play once you have already hit some minimum threshold of merit, and there are different backdoors for super rich/connected applicants that require no such threshold.

Tests are not the same thing as intellect - they are often structured in a way that is unfair to people with low incomes (for instance: the more times you pay to take a test, you can then select the top scores). All of these are pathways that would still exist without legacy.

You're construing my comment as taking a stance that it wasn't - but in case it wasn't clear now, legacy admissions are unequivocally bad. Privileging class status in admissions is obviously bad.

Could you edit your original statement with this clarification? It's not at all obvious or clear, and I think it says quite the opposite - you are emphatically stating it's ok for that legacy / non-legacy gap because legacies have way higher test scores, which seems a very dubious claim given how unbelievable the score gap would have to be to account for a 30% difference.

I don't think I'm emphatically stating it, but I can see how you would read it that way. I added a clarifying reply, but it is too late for the comment to be edited.

To be clear - I'm not stating that there aren't legacy preferences or that the increased admit rate is solely or even majority due to the high test scores - it's not.

A legacy with a 1600 has a substantially higher chance, due to their parents alma mater, than a non-legacy with a 1600.

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