Culture War Roundup for Week Following June 17, 2017. Please post all culture war items here.

The link I gave suggests 15 to 20% are legacies. Harvard's legacy acceptance rate is 30%, six times higher than normal. The legacies SATs are close to median SATs, so are half way between the regular admitted students, and the athletes and URMs. An advantage of perhaps 160 SAT points is suggested at Princeton. That sounds like enough to move someone from one pile to another. It depends what you consider is necessary to move you from one pile to another, but if we assume 100 SAT points is enough, given a normal distribution, 3/4 of legacies are moved from one pile to another. This suggests that legacies are 50% more likely to meet the actual bar than other applicants, which sounds reasonable.

The Huffington Post warning liberal rag claims at least one third of all White students get special preferences. The article claims " As noted by Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons, about 12-13% of each Harvard class is legacy students. In the 2018 Harvard Crimson survey of first-year students, 15.9% reported being a legacy, but I’ll use the most conservative estimate of 12%. "

Also interesting is "12.5% were recruited athletes, and 79.3% of recruited athletes were White."

This suggests that 40% of white students are either legacies or athletes, and if 3/4 of them get preference, that 30% of White students get into top colleges via preferences.

/r/slatestarcodex Thread Parent