Does it help to be a legacy?
The simple answer - it might.
Many high school students speculate and worry about the impact that legacies have in the admissions process. For clarification, legacies are applicants who had a parent attend the college to which s/he is applying. So, if my father went to University X and my mother went to College Y I would be a legacy at both places. Chances are, I would have some advantage at those two schools.
How much of an advantage is impossible to tell. Every college and university has a way of evaluating legacies. Some schools consider legacy status as just another aspect of an applicant’s profile - can help, doesn't hurt, and may tip the scale in the event of indecision. Other schools give them a stronger preference. While some colleges don't give much of any weight to students whose parents attended the school. Whether one feels that this preferential system is fair is another issue entirely, but short of changing institutional policy via an equal protection argument, you're best bet is not to worry about it.
Trying to get information out of an admissions officer on their legacy policy will be difficult, because, short of a quantifiable system, legacies are just like all other applicants, read in the same manner and evaluated as the sum of their many parts… just with a little edge. Whether that little edge will be the difference between acceptance and denial is impossible to tell without a specific individual in a broader context of a particular applicant pool. Gone are the days where admissions officers quantify aspects of students' applications. Our Supreme Court has made itself clear about these practices.
So, feel free to ask admissions officers how they consider legacies but don’t expect a hard and fast answer. They’re not trying to be evasive. It’s just not a simple question.
One thing that you can ask that has a simple answer is how legacy is defined. Most schools define legacies as those applicants who had a parent or step parent attend the school. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins usually don’t count. Siblings at the school may be considered, but they may not grant the applicant the label of legacy, per se. Before inquiring about legacy status, though, consider what good this information even does for you. It shouldn't impact your decision to apply to a school and you will not be able to change where your family members attended colleges. To me, it seems that the answer to any legacy-based questions would only serve to establish expectations which, as discussed above, on this topic, is a poor tool for doing so.
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Posted on October 21, 2007 under |
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