Let's say two people are applying to Harvard and it's the year 2019 (I think they stopped legacy admissions recently). They both have a 1550 and 4.3 GPA. Both went to good high schools. Both helped underprivileged youths learn to code. However one of them has two alumni parents who are both well known, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists in DC that helped expose the corruption of the much hated X politician during the Y scandal, they are White House Correspondents and they are regularly featured on the news. The other student has parents who are not alumni. Harvard has to pick between these two students. Which one do you think Harvard picks?

Note that you cannot argue the legacy student actually has a lower SAT score because Harvard admitted legacy students had higher than avg. SAT scores and because the study controlled for SAT score.

Believe it or not, this is the kind of profile a lot of legacy admits would have.

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downut a day ago | parent [-]

"Which one do you think Harvard picks?"

Do you not understand what the point of legacy preference admissions is? I will supply it here: Legacies take the place of the higher performing non-legacy candidate, not the equivalent one. Is this difficult to understand? Why?

	▲	onetimeusename a day ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think that's the point of legacy admissions. I think it's purpose is exactly what the grandparent said which is to cultivate a network of people. The problem with saying legacy preference is to take the place of higher performing non-legacy candidates is that legacy admits generally perform above average at least at Harvard although it's probably true elsewhere. See here[1]: The average SAT score among legacy students was 1543, while it was 1515 for non-legacy students. So it could still be for replacing higher performing non-legacies meaning Harvard targeted and rejected a bunch of people with even higher SAT scores than the legacies but I don't find that very convincing. [1] (https://features.thecrimson.com/2023/freshman-survey/academi...)