For Elm City applicants, a home-field advantage
When Alisha Butler ’09 sat down in her first class at Yale, she hadn’t yet graduated from high school — nor had she even submitted her admissions application. The year before she moved into her Old Campus dorm, the Hillhouse High School graduate, now a Calhoun College resident and political-science major, held her own among classes full of college students. In between homecoming and prom, Butler managed to complete courses in both the anthropology and political science departments — and within months, she was walking through Phelps Gate with her Yale ID.
Butler and the other New...
...even academically qualified students from Hopkins can find there's a hierarchy when it comes to admission to Yale, the above poster is correct, his or her own child notwithstanding... the Yale-connected parent, in my observation, has to have pull, as faculty, or in another position. I don't imagine the offspring of too many C&T workers at Yale end up as Elis....
Yale should commit to taking even more students from the local community (New Haven + immediately surrounding towns), especially once the college is expanded. These students often bring a lot more to the campus than they get credit for, by helping to provide a more grounded sense of perspective for their peers. (They also tend to do very well)
Growing up in a public school with many children of Yale faculty, I can attest that usually it was only the most talented of those children who were admitted (and who, likewise, gained admission to Harvard, Princeton, etc.) -- not necessarily the children with the most accomplished Yale-affiliated parents. I had two very gifted friends, children of Yale faculty, who were not admitted to Yale.
I would like to point out that Yale takes a wide range of people from New Haven as well as the rest of the world. My roommate since freshman year is a minority student from West Haven who is at Yale instead of UConn only because of Yale's financial aid support, so it's certainly not just professors' children from Hopkins.
I would imagine that children of Yale faculty, if they are at all like their parents, must be doing extremely well academically (probably even better than children of Yale graduates who are not professors). This would explain why many of them from New Haven get into Yale. Nothing here should come as a surprise.
My child is about to graduate from Hopkins. My child does not have the academic credentials and did not apply for Yale so please do not interpret my comments as "sour grapes." However my impression is that there is more than a whiff of nepotism in who gets accepted from Hopkins to Yale. It takes more than legacy, many if not most,also have a parent who is a faculty member or a "higher up" in academic administration.