Thread by @sociologybro

Brett Kavanaugh boasted, under oath, that he got into Yale with no connections. This is verifiably untrue—granddaddy went to Yale.

In this thread, I’m going to explain the bullshit that is legacy admissions.

A legacy student is someone whose relatives attended the same school. Because of a familial affiliation, they are given extra care and consideration by admissions committees, to put it lightly.

What qualifies as a relative? Below is Yale’s Class of 2022 profile. It names 11% of students as having legacy affiliation. This number, however, only includes the students of parents. Counting grandpa and grandma, this number is much higher.

According to the New York Times, Yale has admitted to accepting ~20-25% of legacy applications each year. It’s overall acceptance rate is 6.3%.

A 2011 publication in Economics of Education Review found that legacy status gives, on average, a 45% increase in probability of admission if one’s parent attended. Those with relatives other than parents saw a 14% increase.

And this is data from 2011, not 1982. In 1982, USNews rankings did not exist, and “diversity” was not yet an American buzzword. You tell me if it was better or worse.

In other words, at a place like Yale, you’re more likely to have legacy affiliation than you are to be Black or low-income. The holy trinity is still the white, wealthy legacy.

This data doesn’t even include the students who can count on massive resources like outsourced recommendations and big fat donations to their school of choice.

For example, my prep school classmate’s parents donated 10 million dollars to Yale in 2014. That is over 200 times the price of tuition. Suffice to say, he got in.

straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia…

Legacy admissions exists to incentivize donations and maintain generational power. It is a reproductive mechanism of the ruling elite.

Kavanaugh learned this lesson early on—that if you have money, connections, look a certain way, act a certain way—the world is yours, and fuck everyone who says it isn’t.

The only thing Kavanaugh pulled himself up by was his boof-straps.