If I understand what you are saying, the same is true at undergraduate private institutions. Average SAT scores of admittees are very important for the ranking stuff. But that doesn't stop the legacy/wealthy stuff.
Let me summarize, competition puts bounds on what admissisions committees can do. If they are a school that gives credit to legacy candidates, usually private schools concerned with fund raising and alumni loyalty, it is likely to be the case that the student has to be pretty much in the ball park anyway. In this perspective legacy candidates would get the nod if it they are close or comparable to non-legacy candidates. I went to a school with students with a parent (or even two) that had gone to the school. Were they legacy admits? Maybe, some were the sharpest students there. The students with football or sports points in admissions were far more likely to be unable to do the work.
So in this perspective, the charge that Bush was a legacy candidate at Harvard Business School (which he wasn't since his father is a dedicated Yalie) has to rest on the case that he was not comparable to other candidates but "got in anyway". So the critics have to charge that he "got in" because his father was an ambassador. The alternative view would be that he was admitted because he was a Yale graduate with a reasonable GPA and more importantly positive letters from his experience in the National Guard as a pilot and in various campaign jobs (business schools are big on leadership). I believe he was also president of his fraternity at Yale - an indication of leadership and experience that might help in admissions. We often ask questions of students who were dorm floor monitors or fraternity/sorority leaders about some of the difficult decisions they had to make in those positions and what they learned from the position of responsibility. In any case, Bush had to get through the mandatory flunk out rate of 10%, which he did.
I think it stands to reason that in graduate school, particularly at HBS which is probably the best funded institution in the US, legacy admits for financial reasons are less likely than at the undergraduate level. Their students have more of a track record of their own with work experience, substantial letters of recommendation from bosses who have worked with them for a couple of years, etc. In addition, the forced failure rate in a standard set of classes makes such exceptions more transparent and more embarassing. |
