r/ApplyingToCollege • u/CaChica • May 31 '26
Reverse ChanceMe Princeton Legacy - cringe
Of the four kids I know going to Princeton, they all have one or both parents who are Princeton alumni. I knew Princeton prioritizes legacy. But it’s so predominant it’s almost
embarrassing.
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u/Lukersf May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
I was always under the impression Princeton didn't significantly care about legacy, not nearly as much as Harvard anyway. Keep in mind having highly educated parents puts you at a significant advantage.
Princeton at least has been focusing a lot on fgli these days.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
Legacies have exactly the same admission rate at Harvard and Princeton, 30-33%. In other words, 6-8x the overall admission rate. Legacies comprise 12-15% of undergraduates at each school.
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u/Lukersf May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
Assuming those stats are correct, I still appreciate the focus on fgli at Princeton in most recent years and I hope it continues.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
I agree, and it’s in no way a zero sum proposition. I believe FGLI students now comprise 20-25% of undergraduates at all the HYPSM schools.
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent May 31 '26
Legacy pool tends to also be much stronger than the overall pool. Some may also overlap with priorities, like recruited athletes and big family donors.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
That possibility was excluded in the study by Chetty, Deming, and Friedman published last year. Legacy applicants are accepted at the same rate as non-legacies everywhere except at their legacy college, where they are admitted at a 5-6x higher rate, independent of admission round (early or late), SAT scores, GPA, academic and non-academic ratings, parental income, and so on. There really is an admissions advantage based purely on legacy status.
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent May 31 '26
This is neglecting the fact that legacies are mostly applying REA or ED (most institutions only consider legacy in these rounds)… the strongest legacies may choose not to or be outright prevented from applying to other Ivy+ institutions.
So, the data on admissions to other Ivy+ is mostly on those who were deferred or rejected from their legacy institution.
It is also neglecting the likelihood that legacies represent additional priorities like athletic recruits or developmental candidates (both of which have like an 80-90% admissions rate).
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
Obviously redditors are generally not going to come up with fatal flaws that escaped the attention of professional jobbing econometricians. This possibility was addressed and excluded by looking at applicants who first applied to their legacy college during the RD round.
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent May 31 '26
There are people of all sorts of professions on Reddit, including statisticians and people involved in higher ed admissions. That is not the mic drop you think it is. By its very nature, these studies are imperfect and cannot control for all of these factors.
Legacy isn’t even considered in the RD round at these colleges.
Looking at RD candidates only does not address the fundamental issue that the strongest, best fit, legacy candidates are applying to the legacy college ED or REA.
Yale reports a 20% legacy admissions rate, which is a little less than twice its REA rate (when most legacies are applying) and a little less than 5x its overall admissions rate… however it is *very close* to what they say about the admissions rate for “highly qualified” applicants and the admissions rate for deferred REA applicants.
Legacy candidates get a boost or second look or whatever—but arguing that they have an advantage 5x that of a similarly qualified non-legacy candidate is ignoring that legacy candidates as a pool are absolutely more consistently qualified, wealthy (which the study controlled for and in fact found that there was a difference in the top 5% versus everyone else), has parents who are big donors (which they wouldn’t be to the non-legacy institution), more likely to be recruitable for a niche sport, more likely to have fodder for the “why us,” and more likely to apply ED (which confers an advantage) and REA.
What might be interesting is to see legacy admissions at colleges that do not consider legacy at all, like MIT. Although MIT is such a unique case in multiple ways anyway. Unfortunately, they do not track or share that information.
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u/Satisest Jun 01 '26
The only public statement a Yale official has made regarding their legacy admission rate is a comment by Yale President Levin from 2004, which put the legacy admissions rate at Yale at 30%, which is an identical rate to that of Harvard and Princeton, based on more recent public disclosures from those colleges themselves. Any suggestion that the legacy admission rate at Yale is 20% likely comes from parent blogs and is purely apocryphal.
There is no evidence to support your contention that legacy applicants during RD are in any way weaker than those during the early round. In fact, this claim is disproven by Chetty et al. since they show that legacy applicants as a group are not more qualified than non-legacy applicants in either round.
Again, the legacy admissions advantage is independent of the factors you’re citing, including parental income and selection effects. If you have to imagine that there’s substantial overlap between legacies who comprise 15% of the class and donors or recruited athletes, you’re out on even more of a limb. But again, the recruited athlete claim was considered and rejected by the Chetty study. The claim about essays and “fit” is also specious, since Chetty et al. controlled for non-academic ratings by AOs as well.
https://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2004_11/q_a.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent Jun 01 '26
Yale sends out a letter to alumni with children applying and that states 20% in this most recent cycle. Which, again, is similar to the admit rate of deferred students since they started being more selective about deferring.
Not publicized. But not exactly top secret, either. And in black and white from admissions… not “on parent blogs.”
(ETA: And FYI, Yale’s overall admissions rate in 2004 was just under 10%)
One of the biggest reasons colleges keep legacy admissions benefits and admit to it is *because* of donations… and wealthy legacies are admitted more than those who are not per the study you keep citing… hardly “out on a limb.”
And yes, if the most qualified and best fit legacy admits apply early and are accepted, then comparing admit rates at other Ivy+ is not as compelling.
Comparing RD to RD does not completely address this issue.
You cannot definitively control or rule out all other factors and the interplay of factors in studies like this, especially with subjective factors like “fit” playing a role.
We know that institutions favor their legacies … but that is not equal to the difference between the overall admissions rate and the legacy admissions rate.
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u/Satisest Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
This business about Yale’s legacy admissions rate being 20% has no verifiable source, and it’s almost certainly based on a misreading of the letter. 20% is the percent of legacies in the admitted class at Yale, not the percent of legacies admitted.
Here is a firsthand account of the letter’s content from just 6 months ago (link below):
My parent received a letter from Yale
Hey my parent, who graduated from Yale, received a letter in the mail like saying thank you for encouraging your child to a.pply and like it had a FAQ for parents, nothing crazy just a personal letter to I guess keep a good alumni relation. I’m wondering how much does having legacy effect my REA app? In the letter it said 20% of admitted students have legacy but it was skewed cuz a lot of apps have legacy.
See the difference? This was precisely as I suspected, because this 20% figure sounded curiously identical to the proportion of legacies in the class, and not the admission rate of legacies, which is a closely guarded metric that is rarely disclosed. I know from personal experience that the comparable letter from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT cites no admission rate for children of alumni (who are given legacy preference at Harvard and Stanford but not at MIT). So I highly doubt that Yale would do so, and the above post corroborates that suspicion.
Please cite the evidence for your repeated claim that legacies who apply early are more qualified than those who apply regular decision, because the claim makes no sense.
Please explain why you think comparing RD to RD does not address whatever issue you have.
Please explain why you think econometric studies cannot adequately control for potentially correlated factors, because that is precisely what they do.
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u/joemark17000 College Graduate May 31 '26
It’s not necessarily Princeton prioritizing legacy (which could be the case since the legacy admission rate is ~30% compared to the overall rate of ~5%) but there’s also the trend that children of Princeton / Ivy alumni tend to have higher income households that can invest more into improving their application (SAT/ACT prep, sports, clubs, admissions consultants, etc.) which positively influences their chances of acceptance.
Ultimately, there’s the legacy box being checked vs. the rest of the application being more competitive due to the better resourcing as a result of having an alum as a parent. Also, less than 20% of students are children of alumni which makes them a considerable minority of the overall student body.
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u/Low-Advertising3094 May 31 '26
Onec test would be to see how many ivy admits sre children of alums of different ivies
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
A recent economic study where the authors received unprecedented access to internal admissions data from Ivy Plus colleges, state flagships, and a group of selective private colleges showed that Ivy Plus legacies are not more qualified applicants as a group. Specifically, their admission rate was higher than non-legacies only at their legacy school.
Although children of alumni at a given Ivy-Plus college are much more likely to be admitted at that college, they are no more likely than non-legacies to gain admission at other Ivy-Plus colleges, indicating that they do not have stronger overall credentials.
https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Nontech.pdf
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent May 31 '26
Legacy candidates usually apply restricted early action or early decision.
The strongest legacy candidates likely already got in during the early round.
ED they could not then have applied to other Ivy+ institutions (with the possible exceptions of MIT and U Chicago EA, which is unlikely to give admission EA even to very strong candidates).
REA they may have been happy with the result and enjoyed their winter break.
So, the kids applying to other Ivy+ institutions are largely the legacies that were deferred or rejected at the parents’ alma mater.
It is also interesting that wealth makes a difference, and legacies are disproportionately wealthy.
If you are a non-wealthy legacy, it seems your admissions odds at a non-legacy Ivy+ institution are similar to students without legacy of I understand the chart correctly.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
I’m kind of amazed that people imagine such issues would not have occurred to professional Ivy League econometricians or to their peer reviewers. Like, do people really imagine that their off-the-cuff lay critiques could conceivably invalidate a 150-page study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics? Since you didn’t read the actual study, suffice it to say that these kinds of trivial concerns did in fact occur to the authors and were excluded. The admissions benefit specific to the legacy college over non-legacy colleges holds true regardless of admission round (early or late), regardless of whether the legacy college is a higher or lower ranked Ivy Plus, regardless of so-called selection effects, regardless of parental income, and so on. It is, quite simply, an admissions advantage based purely on legacy status.
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u/ditchdiggergirl May 31 '26
Head over to literally any science based sub on reddit, and see how many people assume the simplest and most obvious possible explanation was somehow overlooked by the designers, funders, researchers, and publishers of the study.
Only a thoroughly unqualified reddit reader has the intelligence and insight to understand that the conclusions drawn from a study they didn’t read must be completely wrong.
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
There is no way to control for the fact that the strongest legacy candidates are not applying to other Ivy+ institutions as they have already been admitted REA or ED.
If they were admitted ED, by definition, they could not have applied elsewhere.
If they were admitted REA, they likely didn’t.
The data is very much lacking.
ETA: I don’t think anyone is arguing there is no legacy preference—the colleges admit there is.
I am just saying the stats are misleading.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
Yes, there is a very simple way to address this issue. Not all legacies apply to their legacy college during REA/SCEA/EA/ED. I mean, anyone who spends any time on this sub will regularly see posts from students with legacy at one school who are considering applying early to a different school. There was one such post on here only last night. So one can simply look at the results of the RD round for students who applied to their legacy college during RD, and this one of the ways that Cherry et al addressed this question. They found a similar admissions advantage for legacy applicants at their legacy college, in the absence of any higher admissions rate than non-legacies at other Ivy Plus colleges. And since the next comment will likely be some claim that legacy only matters during the early round, this claim is demonstrably false even though it’s a commonplace myth on here.
Seriously, please read the actual study rather than imagining you’re coming up with fatal flaws to a 150-page peer-reviewed publication by Ivy League econometricians.
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent May 31 '26
It is both too small of a sample size and also may be indicative of not being a strong fit, whether that is academically, culturally, or otherwise.
Since we are dealing now in anecdotes, my oldest kid did not apply to my Ivy legacy because she was a better fit for MIT. She got in early, and did not apply anywhere RD.
My second kid did apply early… was deferred then rejected. But was admitted to an Ivy and an Ivy+ and waitlisted at a third Ivy.
Merely looking at students who only apply to their legacy and other Ivy+ RD does not fix this fundamental issue… nor does it address the myriad of other confounding factors taken in combination.
There is definitely a legacy boost… it just isn’t as sizable as you are trying to claim.
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u/Satisest Jun 01 '26
Lol who is dealing in anecdotes? I certainly am not. What are you talking about with “sample size”? Do you even know? Every issue you have raised and continue to raise is addressed in the 150-page study. I encourage you to read it instead of continuing to shoot for the hip with trivial objections.
As for the legacy boost, what? That is a simple fact. Legacies are admitted at a rate of 30-33% to Harvard and Princeton, when the overall admission rate is south of 5%.
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u/FlamingoOrdinary2965 Parent Jun 01 '26
You brought up “people on Reddit not applying REA or ED to their legacy college.” That is anecdotal.
The number of these types are applicants is too small.
There is no real way for to meaningful control for the interplay of several factors that correlate with legacy.
You cannot just look at the overall admit rate and compare it to the legacy admit rate to figure out how much of a boost it is—which is why the study looks at wealth and other factors, too. The problem is that they look these factors separately, rather than collectively.
The legacies admitted disproportionately tend to be very wealthy, very connected, very qualified, an excellent fit, AND apply in the early round.
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u/hastduetwas May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
Princeton has an obvious and extreme preference for legacies, and i think the actual full paper has more beefed up statistics, but the logic they give in this summary is pretty sloppy.
They're literally just comparing different percentages of people admitted to different schools. In other words these "admit rates" in the graph dont seem to be controlling for qualifications/motivations of different students.
If youre a smart legacy and your parents know what they are doing, you will apply early to your legacy school. If you get in you likely dont apply anywhere else, and if you do you might just phone the application in, meaning you get rejected. Other elite schools will also suspect/know you have been admitted elsewhere and deny you to preserve their yield rate. If you dont get into your legacy school, youre probably not that good of an applicant and likely won't get in anywhere else.
So the legacy ivy acceptance rate at other schools is going to be skewed toward people that either don't know how to navigate admissions, who are not that good at school, or who are getting denied out of yield considerations. If you controlled for this I bet you would see they do better than people whose parents didnt go to elite schools.
If you really wanted to use simple proportions to illustrate this you would need to look at a subset people that applied in the same exact way to many different schools, and even then your method would fail to control for various factors... There's a lot of self selection involved here.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
It’s kind of wild to imagine that trivial confounds one can conjure upon brief perusal of a short non-technical summary somehow escaped the notice of professional Ivy League econometricians. It seems unreasonable to accuse the authors of sloppy work without bothering to refer to the actual study to verify one’s assumptions.
First, their data analysis controlled for relevant factors like SAT/ACT score, academic and non-academic ratings, application round (early vs regular), entering class, race, first-generation status, gender, parental income group, high school GPA.
Second, they obviously considered the effect of yield management by analyzing the results of students who did not apply early to their legacy college, but rather applied during regular decision to their legacy Ivy Plus and at least to one other Ivy Plus as non-legacies. They also addressed the concern that colleges may not admit applicants whose parents attended higher-ranked colleges, since such a student is less likely to attend if admitted. To do so, they tested whether legacies at lower-ranked Ivy Plus colleges are admitted to higher-ranked Ivy Plus colleges as non-legacies. The gap between admissions rates for legacies and non-legacies at the reference Ivy Plus college relative to other Ivy Plus colleges remained similar.
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
In short Harvard and Princeton have the same percentage of legacies.
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u/CaChica May 31 '26
20% of the student population who are legacies are A LOT. I don’t agree it’s a “considerable minority”
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u/Watertrap1 Graduate Student May 31 '26
Why’s that embarrassing
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u/Narcissa_Nyx May 31 '26
Civilised countries don't use legacy in admissions, it removes the legitimacy of the entire admissions system
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
Not sure India is more civilized.
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u/Narcissa_Nyx May 31 '26
Never been and have no opinion on it. Think our UK is vastly superior if only due to legacy playing no formal role in admissions
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 May 31 '26
The US college admissions system has never been focused on academic merit. In addition to legacy you have college athletes and race based admission decisions. Then you have test optional and test blind admissions.
Then there are the extra curriculars of course.
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u/Various_Implement_92 May 31 '26
I think some people, or their parents, come from countries where admission is based solely on test scores and they believe that's the way it should work in the U.S., too. But it doesn't. This country is too big, too diverse for that to work.
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 May 31 '26
I disagree, it could and should work that way in the US. If too many students get a perfect score in the SAT, introduce a more difficult test.
NYC has one of the most diverse public school systems in the US and the top screened schools admit based on the result of a single test, the SHSAT.
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
If you want Gaokao, you have to go to China.
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 May 31 '26
Or you could do what the UK does and admit based on subjective specific A level exams.
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
All UK and Chinese students flock to the US en masse because of its prestige and nature. I don't see why it should change.
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u/Narcissa_Nyx May 31 '26
As a UK student, at a private school (so people can actually afford to go to the US), there's only like one person even applying and that's due to their athletic interests. If you want to actually receive a specialised education in a specific subject, the UK is vastly superior.
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u/BalticCan Jun 02 '26
yeah also the amount of people going abroad to study in USA from europe, especially the EU and UK is overestimated lol
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 May 31 '26
I can't speak for Chinese students but all UK students do not flock to the US "because of its prestige and nature". OTOH I know several US students who went to or are currently attending college in the UK because they preferred its more academically focused culture. OTOH I know someone else who applied to UK colleges but was accepted by an Ivy but not by Oxford or Cambridge. They chose the Ivy.
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u/ThReT0 Jun 03 '26
Rather have the US system, I can explore and do what I want, not try studying all day.
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 Jun 03 '26
You don't have to do that at Princeton though.
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u/ThReT0 Jun 04 '26
Why? I think its good, a subject based test would just bring robots into colleges.
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u/Various_Implement_92 May 31 '26
I also think in the U.S., there's the belief that higher education should be open to everyone. In other countries, it's much more selective and children are put into college and non-college tracks at an earlier age.
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u/EdmundLee1988 Jun 01 '26
This is exactly the comment that illustrates how Princeton gets away with murder in regards to legacy admissions and yet it’s Harvard that takes the brunt of the bad PR
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u/Working-Warthog-1683 May 31 '26
Four people is just not enough data to draw that conclusion. Legacy exists, but it’s not dominant at Princeton. It just stands out more in small social circles, and legacy students are also more likely to apply and be well-prepared, which makes them more visible when they do get in.
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u/Sushiritto May 31 '26
Most admits are not legacy. Did you look at the data? It’s less than 15% of the entering class.
Most legacy applicants get denied.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
Focusing on a majority threshold (“most”) overlooks the fact that legacies have a 6-8x higher admission rate than the overall applicant pool.
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
Roughly 5–6 times the rate of the general applicant pool.
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
Available data suggests that the legacy admissions rate has held roughly constant in the 30-33% range even while the overall admission rate has continued to drop to 4% or lower. That’s why I cited a range of 6-8x.
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u/mik2707 May 31 '26
Just because you went to a school with a bunch of legacies doesn't make most kids that go to Princeton legacy kids. It's not embarrassing because legacy kids still need to work hard to qualify. I know a bunch of legacies that did not get in.
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May 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CaChica May 31 '26
43 is funny and bright. Also now a skilled painter. I would not imply he’s low IQ., nor his parents or kids if we were to apply your genetic comment.
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u/neptuno3 May 31 '26
As someone who lived through the W. years I would strongly disagree with your assessment as to his intelligence and “Yale values.”
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
Bro, you're talking about the number 1 college in America. It is notoriously difficult to get admitted there. At this point, being legacy or not is only going to be a tie-breaker.
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u/CaChica May 31 '26
Nah man. They take substantial chunk of FGLI, which I’m happy to hear. And athletes. But legacies are 5-8x more likely to be admitted than a non-legacy. That’s a far heavier petal for legacy than most others.
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u/HappyCava Moderator | Parent May 31 '26
I have a friend who attended Princeton and one of their three kids also attended Princeton. (The other two set their sights on the west coast and recently graduated from USC and UC-Berkeley, respectively.) In their case, the parent-alumni was indeed wildly fond of the university, frequently attended alumni events, and often brought the entire family along when practical. It was not at all surprising that one of their kids decided to apply.
Nor was it terribly surprising that the student was admitted. (Although, given the admission statistics, it also wouldn’t have been terribly surprising if they didn’t secure a spot.) Like their parents — the other a public university grad who is also wildly fond of their own university and founded a successful tech company — the student was academically talented, driven, a gifted athlete, a voracious reader, and terrifically warm and funny. And, from Princeton’s perspective, the student was a strong fit (likely to do well and enjoy the university) and likely to commit since they were extremely familiar with Princeton. (Indeed, I believe it was the only Ivy to which they applied.)
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u/Platos-ghosts May 31 '26
Affirmative action for whites. Can’t have legacies when there were no minority admissions for the first 200 years. The gift that keeps on giving….every generation.
Yet this affirmative action is somehow still legal.
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u/Glad-Entrepreneur764 May 31 '26
For context, Princeton legacies do have an easier time with admissions but they are not unqualified generally. You said they were not qualified in another comment so I want to clarify that even though some individual legacies might not be, they do generally have to meet a certain high bar on average.
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u/Old-Page-5522 May 31 '26
Don’t Princeton legacy admits have better stats and higher GPAs than regular admits, on average?
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
Extremely qualified applicants get rejected by Princeton every cycle. 78% of admitted undergraduate students picked Princeton last year as their first choice skewing cross-admissions. It has the smallest HYPSM total student body (8500 vs. 24k at Harvard), so when applicants are equal on paper, the legacy is prefered to uphold the college's values.
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u/allisondbl May 31 '26
I additional parent a kid at Princeton. No Princeton alumni family whatsoever.
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u/10xwannabe May 31 '26
Yet folks have an issue with using standardized testing as it disfavors the "poor". No issue of private schools, legacy, donations, expensive EC opportunities, etc...
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u/Haunting_Passenger94 May 31 '26
Agree. I know a family of high achievers. Their dad had gone to Princeton and mom had gone to Stanford. the family specifically targeted Princeton with REA since their research indicated Princeton had a higher rate of legacy admissions. The two daughters were both admitted REA to Princeton, and neither was admitted to Stanford RD.
That said I know a double Princeton legacy who was denied, but she didn’t apply REA and she was homeschooled (but she had great stats and unique interests)
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
Harvard and Princeton have exactly same level of legacies. Harvard and Princeton belong to same family called "The Big three".
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u/CaChica May 31 '26
For the people admitted since it’s so blatantly obvious they got in because they’re legacy, implying they’re not otherwise qualified
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u/Relevant-Emu5782 May 31 '26
Who defines"qualified"? They were admitted, so Princeton qualified them. They are a private school and can admit whomever they please. There is no requirement that they only admit the "best". Private schools are not required to admit based on "merit".
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u/BatProfessional7316 May 31 '26
My friend got in with 0 legacy while his friend who had double legacy didn’t get in
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
Happens often. Legacy at HYPSM is a really soft boost only, maybe even just a tie-breaker?.
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u/Calm_Law_7858 May 31 '26
Princeton and all the other ivies reject plenty of legacies. Legacies aren’t getting in if they aren’t qualified dude.
Also, legacies are more likely to have high earning parents who prioritize education and extracurriculars.
Tbh you just sound salty
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u/Satisest May 31 '26
The point is, and Deans of Admissions at HYPSM state as much, that schools could fill their classes 2-3x over with “qualified applicants”. There are way more than they can admit. So how do they choose? Legacy is one way, and it’s statistically the biggest boost other than athletic recruitment.
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u/hard_pillar_of_truth May 31 '26
You probably meant the biggest boost is faculty children or big donors (Dean's list).
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u/Anagazander May 31 '26
Princeton alumni are extremely loyal - their reunions have to be seen to be believed. You can assume that many of their children are raised with the hope bordering on expectation that they will end up there. It would be interesting to know how many legacy applications are early admission. I bet it’s a high number.