Legacy student

Legacy preference or legacy admission is a preference given by an institution or organization to certain applicants on the basis of their familial relationship to alumni of that institution, with college admissions being the field in which legacy preferences are most controversially used. (Students so admitted are referred to as legacies or legacy students.) Regarding college admissions, legacy admissions are practiced almost exclusively at American colleges and universities and are virtually unheard of in post-secondary institutions in other countries around the world. Legacy preferences in elite college and university admissions in the U.S. are widespread: almost three-quarters of research universities and nearly all liberal arts colleges grant legacy preferences in admissions. Schools vary in how broadly they extend legacy preferences, with some schools granting this favor only to children of undergraduate alumni, while other schools extend the favor to children, grandchildren, siblings, nephews, and nieces of alumni of undergraduate and graduate programs. Preferential treatment based on legacy routinely grants legacies substantial bonus points on their admissions assessments and extra consideration if their applications are initially rejected. As a body of entering freshmen, legacies almost invariably have substantially lower GPAs and SAT scores than the larger body of entering freshmen, and, during their undergraduate careers, legacies as a body of students typically perform worse than the overall student body. A 2005 analysis of 180,000 student records obtained from nineteen selective colleges and universities found that, within a set range of SAT scores, being a legacy raised an applicant's chances of admission by 19.7 percentage points.

While the sons of wealthy Americans had received priority in college admissions throughout the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century, frustrated by the poor academic performances of their students, elite colleges raised their admission standards. Immigrants—especially the children of Jewish immigrant families—and Catholics and people from modest socioeconomic backgrounds frequently performed well on the new admissions tests and started to garner large numbers of undergraduate seats at top universities, while the number of admissions for wealthy white Anglo-American stock dropped significantly. In response, several Ivy League institutions began an official practice of legacy admissions, designed to reserve large numbers of seats at the top schools for the sons of wealthy Protestant American stock. These legacy admissions included decreasing the importance of entrance exams and adding such elements as assessing the "personal characteristics" of the young men seeking admittance, considering their "home influence," interviewing some of the applicants, and asking for letters of recommendation attesting to their character. Such elements in the application process curtailed the admittance of immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and working-class men and restored the overwhelming presence of the white, wealthy Anglo-Protestant men.

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