We work with a lot of legacies every year and every year we have to explain to parents that legacy isn't the make or break at top schools like Duke. What do we mean by this? Well, a lot of parents we work with think that just because their student is a legacy, it means they will get in. However, that isn't true. Colleges don't talk very openly about legacy admissions and that leaves parents in the dark, so we wanted to break down what is really going on with legacy admissions at Duke and what you can do to get your legacy in.
Do legacies get into Duke at a higher rate?
This is a surprisingly hard question to answer. Professionally, we believe so. However, Duke has not published any data suggesting they do or what that rate would be. So why do we think they do? Well, it mostly breaks down to an industry standard. Most schools have a slightly higher acceptance rate for legacies than for non-legacy students.
While Duke has never published any numbers about their own admissions, a researcher at Duke did a study on legacy admissions at Harvard and published their legacy acceptance rate. Why are we talking about Harvard? Well mostly to illustrate a point and also most colleges follow Harvard’s lead. The study found that between 2014 and 2019, Harvard let in around 30% of legacies. This was a much higher rate than their around 6% overall acceptance rate. This is amongst the highest rate differential that we have ever seen and in subsequent years we believe this rate fell quite a bit. But we bring this up because even with the highest rate we have seen, most legacies don't get in. We want to say this again, the majority of legacy candidates at top schools don't get in.
Wait, so what's a top legacy?
While it is true that legacies often come from privilege, it also means they usually come from families who invest heavily in their education. The legacies we work with routinely go to great high schools, work with great tutors, and have great resumes. This makes them highly competitive candidates when it comes time to apply. Your student should be among their ranks if they want to be the type of legacy that Duke lets in.
To be a competitive candidate, your student should do a couple of things:
Get great grades
If you google "Duke average accepted GPA" you will get a lot of third-party unverified blogs claiming that it's 4.13. We advise taking these with a grain of salt because this number has not been confirmed by Duke. However, we can tell you that our students who get into Duke have almost perfect GPAs. Duke is looking for students who excel in their classes and have challenging and dynamic transcripts. Alumni parents often hire top tutors the minute their student's grades start slipping. This makes so many legacy students have great GPAs. Your legacy needs to keep up with them.
And good scores
Duke does publish information about standardized test scores. For the Class of 2026, the middle 50% of admitted students either received between 1510-1570 on the SAT or 34-36 on the ACT. You may have noticed that some in the middle 50% received a perfect score on the ACT, meaning over 25% of admitted students received a perfect score on the ACT. Much like academic tutors, alumni parents routinely employ top SAT/ACT tutors to ensure their students are getting perfect or near-perfect scores, and this is why.
Consider working with a counselor
Ok, this might seem self-serving; we are counselors after all. But 22% of the Class of 2024 worked with a private counselor when applying to Duke and so did 21% of the Class of 2023. We would guess that this included a lot of legacies. Grades and scores are the most important part of an application, but they aren't the only part. There are simply not enough seats at the table for everyone with good grades and scores, they have to shine on the rest of the application as well. Working with a counselor can help your student do that. We often start with legacy students early in their high school career or just before their junior year to help them build the right kind of resume. But even if they start with us right before they apply, we can help them package them in the best way possible to get in.
Your student needs to have interesting extracurricular activities that tell a story about what they are passionate about. That means isolating an interest early on, expanding it, and pursuing it at the highest possible level.
And apply early
If your legacy is serious about Duke, you should have them apply early. Most recently Duke's acceptance rate has been hovering around 6.3%. However, that's not the full story. That rate is actually made of 2 rates, the early acceptance rate, and the regular decision rate. The early rate was around 21% while the regular rate was around 5%. This is a big difference. Probably a bigger difference than the legacy vs non-legacy rates. The best chance a competitive student has to get in is as a legacy during ED. Especially because, for theClass of 2025, "Legacy students were more likely to apply early decision than regular decision to Duke—81.7% versus 54.4%, respectively."
We just threw a lot of information at you and we know it can be confusing and a letdown if you thought Duke was a sure thing for your kid. Thankfully we are here if you need help or someone to walk you through it.
Reach out here.