I just realized that there are more Appalachians in America than Asian Americans. But how many people have you run into in an elite school with an Appalachian accent? (Or a southern or mid-atlantic, or other lower-tier white accent?)
Maybe the redneck culture of poor Appalachian people is less sticky than the redneck culture of many poor Blacks in the US. My personal anecdotes support that, but then selection bias means they necessarily must.
When I run into guys at work with heavy Appalachian accents, they tend to be heavy machinery mechanics. That's also where I find Black guys who cling to a large amount of Black redneck culture. And those two groups together comprise the supermajority of heavy machinery mechanics at work, come to think of it.
Source: I spent my entire childhood on counties adjacent to what is considered 'Appalachia', and I went to a higher-end college with a significant affirmative action focus on geographic distribution around the US.
Even the SAT score can be gamed.[3] I think pretty much every admissions advantage that exists is found and exploited. These schools are no longer about providing an elite education to talented students who want to get ahead. They are credential factories and students who go these schools have parents that push them from young ages to get in because they want the status credential. I have all sorts of stories about how fake a lot of students CVs are. Fake non profits, doing math competitions despite not liking math, getting into obscure sports, etc. It's absolutely not just white people who do this.
I am not advocating for dropping test scores. I just want to point out how aggressively people pursue getting admitted to elite schools and the specter of cheating hangs over it all too. I have friends who did tutoring in other countries who talk about paid SAT test takers.
[1]: https://gocrimson.com/sports/mens-fencing/roster
[2]: https://goprincetontigers.com/sports/mens-squash/roster?path...
[3]: https://qz.com/980074/the-sat-can-be-hacked-and-gamed-with-t...
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...
I don't know if whites are generally the beneficiary of student athletic admissions policies at all elite schools although it is complicated because of things like decades old sports from before diversity was a concern and team size. I don't see Harvard cutting long successful teams just to appease non white people but then again they probably would. Also things like the men's football team have a very large roster of 100+ people.
[1]: https://stanforddaily.com/2020/09/27/varsity-cuts-challengin...
This is the arbitrage opportunity for lower-ability legacy students. If the schools provided elite educations, they would chew up and spit out lazy rich kids (and probably generate parental acrimony toward the schools in the process, weakening the donor connections.) As affirmative action of all shapes and sizes creates an ever-expanding group of people most likely to fail who the school is particularly determined to not flunk, there is more safe space for deadweight rich kids (which, for the record, I suspect is an overplayed trope relative to actual prevalance, though probably not hard to find at top-ranked schools.)
Is that generally true or is that a stereotype?
Legacy students also had a higher average SAT score than non-legacy students, at 1523 for legacy students and 1491 for non-legacy students.[1]
[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/8/2025-freshman-su...
Now, a few guesses: first, to the extent that affirmative action is even partially successful in targeting disadvantaged groups, affirmative action students should be less likely to be legacy, meaning that applications of legacy students should at least reflect a numerical superiority consistent with the strength of the affirmative action bias. Second, I will say that from personal experience I valued, more highly than was deserved, the schools that my parents attended; in this way those schools were the beneficiaries of highly effective advertising, through my parents, that made me more focused on those particular schools than they deserved (so much so that two of the three were two of the four schools I intended to apply to.) The aggregate outcome of that effect across all legacy applicants should be a higher-than-usual applicant quality in the pool of legacy students.
Would the legacies tend to have much higher income, or is any old person who's a child of an alumnus considered a legacy?
At most US elite schools, less than 20 percent is for “non-reserved” seats. Elite schools reserve seats for sports teams (affirmative action for rich white elites with “sports” like fencing and rowing), legacies (affirmative action for rich white elites), related to professors and school administrators (affirmative action for rich white elites), those who write essays on poverty tourism and their work experience in the NGO/white savior/charity scams (rich white elites), and then regular affirmative action (capped at 20%].
So it is a brilliant way to use regular affirmative action for Blacks as a weapon to ensure that rich white elites always win and do not compete with the “deplorable” poorer whites, the Asians and immigrants.