One of the most peculiar aspects of the US college system is legacy. As a young boy in New Zealand, I was often told by people and was quite sad to hear that “life is about who you know rather than what you know.” As a student who was learning a lot but didn't really know anyone, this was fairly depressing wisdom. I wasn't necessarily the most social, I didn't have the most friends, but I did have hard work on my side. A system where pure merit and being able to just pour in the effort yielded the best results suited me just fine. The US college system isn't quite as clean cut.

I didn't fully appreciate what legacy admissions meant when I was applying, and I figured I had many cards stacked against me anyway, what did one more card matter?

If you sit back, pull up a cup of tea, and really reflect for a moment, legacy admissions sound somewhat ridiculous. Legacy admissions refers to the system in which colleges grant the children of alumni special privileges in the admissions process. Essentially, if your dad went there, you have a much higher shot of getting in. According to The Guardian newspaper, in 2019 Harvard legacy students had an admission rate of 33%.¹ This gives some of the US colleges a vibe that is more like some kind of exclusive business society or golf club than a holy grail of meritocracy drawing the talented students from far corners of society into the careers they are most equipped for.

Before you jump off your chair and knock over your tea, consider a few things. First, parents who studied at Harvard are likely to be higher income, with more education and perhaps have more motivation than the average person whose child is applying to college. They are more likely to have fostered an academic culture at home that encouraged their children to perform. They may have higher natural IQ levels and may have passed this on to their children. They may be more familiar with the application process and be in a stronger position to help their children navigate it.

As a result, you can't assume the pool of general applicants to Harvard and the pool of legacy applicants to Harvard are the same. Although the legacy pool may have had the aforementioned advantages, the average general student will more than likely be academically and extracurricularly superior than their legacy counterparts.

Second, depending on your philosophical lens, you may want to consider the utilitarian benefits of legacy admissions. Legacy admissions incentives families to try and send multiple generations through the same institution. This feeds a sense of tradition, loyalty, and community. This in part helps to contribute to the high levels of alumni donations, a common aspect of the US college system. All of these donations help to fund financial aid programs, more research resources, better faculty, and other types of student-centric programs.

There are many criticisms that all the donations that go to elite universities are a waste of “altruism” and perhaps are more egotistical in nature. Recognizing all these arguments, I was still delighted as a student in my first year at Harvard to receive more than $US40 thousand in financial aid. It made the tuition bill affordable for my family. Without these massive endowments and the complicated incentives that drive the giving that feeds them, I might not have been able to study at Harvard in the first place.

The UK, which has no legacy admissions, has incredibly historic universities like Oxford and Cambridge. These universities have endowments that are generally 20% or less than their US equivalents.² The lack of legacy admissions doesn't fully explain this vast difference in endowments, but it is one of the factors that makes the US's most elite institutions fundraising machines like no other country.

In 2021, the state of Colorado announced a ban on consideration of the legacy status of students for admission to their public universities.³ As general skepticism of systems that tend to drive inherent inequality grows, the pressure will grow on the system of legacy admissions to be eliminated.

My conception of legacy is very different.

My obsession with education started with my grandfather, John Beaton. John grew up in unrelenting, working class poverty in Montrose, Scotland. He was a very talented academic student with grades that meant he would have been able to win a scholarship to the Montrose Academy.

Tragically, there wasn't even enough money in the family to afford the uniform costs. The big focus in the family at the time was to see that the children were educated to age 14, after which they would leave school to find work so that they could help support the household. My granddad John and my grandmother Sarah didn't want to bring up children in Britain's tough class system. They took the plunge and went to New Zealand more than 60 years ago as a way of giving their children new education opportunities neither of them had had. My grandmother helped to pay the bills by working in a local potato chip factory. My grandfather worked as a sailor for the Merchant Navy and then as a welder.

My mother grew up with minimal economic resources but cheered on by my grandparents, she passionately chased after the best schooling she could receive. After close to 30 rejections, she found a school, Epsom Girls Grammar, one of the strongest schools in Auckland, that was willing to read her out-of-zone application. She earned three university degrees in rapid succession across law, management, and accounting while university education was free. She worked every summer since she was 15 years old to help bring in money to keep the family humming.

My mother went through a difficult divorce just as she was bringing me into the world and had to balance a little baby as a single mother while trying to get her business off the ground. She made substantive sacrifices to send me to outstanding institutions. We were a team. I took my studies very seriously and competed for every scholarship I could get in New Zealand's best private schools—Saint Kentigern School and King's College—to make sure I was placing as little strain on her as possible. My mother has a kind of otherworldly work ethic that is so sewn into her character, even as she passes 60 years young, she only seems to speed up! Surrounded by that kind of intensity and inspiration, how could I not follow in her hardworking footsteps?

Growing up my granddad, now 92 and thriving, had only heard of Oxford. Oxford was the institution that the elite society of the UK would go to get their degrees at a time when he wasn't given the opportunity to finish high school. Telling my grandad more than 65 years after he left the United Kingdom to give his children more opportunity that I had won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford was a special moment for my family.

After I turned 18 and was admitted to Harvard, my mother no longer had to financially support me. A couple of thousand dollars arrived in my bank account from a University of Auckland Scholarship. I began tutoring students in Auckland in the earliest days of Crimson and felt the empowerment of being able to buy my own Oporto burgers without asking my family for support.

In my second year at Harvard, I no longer qualified for financial aid because of the growth of Crimson and my new job at a hedge fund, Tiger Management. Today, I am in a privileged position because of the growth and success of Crimson all over the world. When I am criticized for our focus on the world's best institutions or for pushing privileged opportunities that are hard to access to students across different countries, I am listening, but I wholeheartedly disagree.

Education is the most powerful way to create your own legacy. Few things in life can lead you to stratospherically jump from social class to social class as quickly as an education from one of the world's best institutions. Many of our students have immigrant families who make substantial sacrifices to support the ambition of their children, just as my mother did for me.

The whole reason we introduced programs like Crimson Access Opportunity and other internal scholarships was so that students like Julian, an informatics talent from one of the poorest areas of Mexico, could gain admission to schools like Stanford. Many families forgo material goods, travel, cars, and may have to ask for support from their extended family to invest in their child's education. But what better gift is there? Gratefully, this is exactly what my family did and what they would do all over again for me.

When I meet a young student who is intensely competitive, ambitious, and just wants to know what they need to do to maximize their odds at getting into the best universities, I couldn't be more excited. This system—with its seemingly dichotomous legacy admits and alumni donations, financial aid, and equal opportunity focus—isn't a system I designed or my students designed, but it is what it is, and helping you crack it will help you realize your wildest ambitions.

I am honestly excited about helping you do just that.