Legacy Status - Pros and Cons
Level 2 - Admissions 101
Welcome back!
Shorter article today, but that just means we are getting to the point faster. Working on something big based on some feedback we have received that will be advantageous to families out there.
More to come soon on that!
In the meantime, a reader asked a question about the pros and cons associated with being a legacy applicant. With legacy status a common topic of discussion, many wonder about its value and the pros and cons associated with it.
For the sake of simplicity, we will provide three pros and three cons associated with legacy status.
Note - we are not discussing legacy status on its merits. We are only discussing this as a potential applicant and what it means for them.
First, the pros.
Pros:
Provides immutable characteristic to your application for potential points
Simply put, legacy status is something that an applicant either has or does not. There is no way to “earn it,” for better or for worse.
Because it cannot be earned, it is an applicant characteristic that provides a detail that can be useful in separating applicants. Remember, it comes down to the details the more competitive the application process is.
When you compete in the application process, any points you can earn without having to do anything are great.
It positions you for scholarships and better financial aid packages
Some colleges and universities have scholarships that are exclusively for children of alums. The pool of applicants for those scholarships is inherently smaller and it puts you in a position to be able to get needed financial funds for college.
In the hierarchy of financial aid, scholarships and grants are the best forms of aid. They do not need to be repaid and can reduce your debt obligations.
Even if a scholarship does not have a requirement to be the son or daughter of an alumnus, some scholarships will provide an advantage (spoken or unspoken) to those who are legacy applicants over non-legacy applicants.
Why?
Because scholarships can be used to sway individuals to attend a college or university. Legacy applicants are preferred in many ways because they are more likely to :attend the college and university than a more general applicant.
Legacy status can be an advantage if you are waitlisted
Waitlisting is all about having a steady supply of applicants who you believe would do well at the college, but were not accepted in the overall class.
The waitlist is designed to help fill a class if the accepted students do not matriculate the way you would hope.
When a college calls a student on the waitlist, they want to be sure that student will actually matriculate.
Legacy students are more likely to attend, and therefore may get preference in being pulled off the waitlist over a non-legacy student.
Cons:
Legacy status only applies to a few schools
Legacy status varies to some extent based on the school itself. Not every school defines it the same way, but generally, for you to qualify as a legacy, someone in your immediate family must have attended the program. That would mean:
Your parents
Your children
Your spouse
Your siblings
Because of that, the status only applies to a handful of schools. Add on that legacy status only applies to the exact school they attended, and it can be very limited.
For example, if your brother went to Berkeley School of Law and you apply to their undergraduate program, you do not have legacy status for the purposes of their college application process.
As a result, the advantage is only going to really affect a handful of schools. Add on that those schools may not be the right programs for the study that you are pursuing, and it has diminishing returns as something to strategize around.
Legacy preference is going away
To be candid, legacy preference certainly is not getting stronger. Some states are passing laws to ban colleges from considering legacy preference.
That means that in all likelihood, as an applicant you may not even get a serious consideration to utilize it at all.
Even if it were not for laws and public pressure to eliminate legacy preference, not every college considers it.
Even if they do, it is not necessarily to the same extent.
As a result, it is more of an afterthought in the application process - something where you should choose colleges that make sense for you and if one of them happens to be a college where you would qualify as a legacy applicant, then you go for it.
Legacy narrows college options and encourages bad college selection
This is a little more nuanced - legacy status only matters in two circumstances:
Selection strategy in highly competitive college admissions
Deciding whether to apply to a given college
In the first category, we are talking about whether you apply to Columbia or Princeton, where you have legacy status at Columbia but not at Princeton. That is where the details matter and the difference in academics are negligible.
In the second category though, we are talking about building a college list based on where someone else went to college.
Any process built on that process makes goals secondary and ease of admission the primary goal.
That is not a winning strategy.
Put legacy status out of your mind - remember you either have it or you do not. And your college admissions strategy should not rely on having it.