According to a study conducted by a Duke University sociology professor published in August, legacy students at Duke (and, presumably, many other colleges across the country) have a tendency to underperform in their college courses compared to their peers.

The professor’s study tracked the performance of Duke students who reported having at least one Duke grad as a family member, as well as the performance of other students whose parents are college-educated, but not Duke alumni. 

The legacy students’ achieved a lower GPA during freshman year, and reported a perception of “lower levels of ability and confidence” in the classroom compared to their non-legacy peers.

It will be interesting to see if this study breeds more investigation into the performance of legacy students at other colleges. When you think about it, favoring legacy students in the admissions process (a common practice at lots of top schools around the country) is only making the rich richer, and keeping students from middle-class families out of the top colleges.

Not every student has the opportunity or the desire to attend college straight out of high school. While the traditional age to begin college is 17 or 18, there are many older college students working towards degrees these days.

These schools have the highest enrollment, by percent, of undergraduate students over the age of 25. 

10.  University of Maryland - University College (82%)
9.  Peirce College (83%)
8.  Kaplan University (85%)
7.  University of Phoenix (88%)
6.  Thomas Edison State College (88%)
5.  Union Institute and University (94%)
4.  Woodbury College (95%)
3.  Charter Oak State College (95%)
2.  Western Governors University (95%)
1.  Excelsior College (97%)

Are you a non-traditional college student trying to make sense of the college search and application process? You can find all the answers at CampusCompare.

Here’s a sampling of the most competitive schools according to the 2009 U.S. News and World Report college and university rankings. The number in parentheses is the percent of students accepted from the entire application pool each year.

Notice that the Ivy triumvirate—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—are kept from the top spot by two world-renowned conservatories, the Curtis Institute of Music and Juilliard. The talent at both of those schools is phenomenal.

Why not take a spin on our What Are My Chances? tool and see where you stack up with the competition?

10.  College of the Ozarks - Point Lookout, MO (11.8%)

9.  U.S. Naval Academy - Annapolis, MD (11.8%)
 
8.  Cooper Union - New York, NY (10.7%)

7.  Columbia University - New York, NY (10.6%)

6.  Stanford University - Stanford, CA (10.3%)

5.  Yale University - New Haven, CT (9.9%)

4.  Princeton University - Princeton, NJ (9.7%)

3.  Harvard University - Cambridge, MA (9.2%)

2.  Juilliard School - New York, NY (7.7%)

1.  Curtis Institute of Music - Philadelphia, PA (4.8%)