California bans universities from admitting students based on ‘legacy’

California became the fifth state in the US to ban universities from admitting students based on their family connections, and the second state, after Maryland, to extend the ban to private, non-profit universities.

“Hard work, good grades and a well-rounded background should earn you a spot in the incoming class – not the size of the check your family can write or who you’re related to,” Phil Ting, the Democratic state assembly member, who authored the legislation, said in a statement.

Private non-profit colleges popular with wealthy Americans, including Stanford and the University of Southern California, will be affected by the new legislation, which goes into effect in September 2025.

Illinois, Colorado and Virginia have previously passed legislation banning public university admission based on “legacy status”, or connections to donors, according to the National Conference of State Legislators.

The wave of new state laws comes in response to the decision last year by the supreme court’s conservative majority to bar both private and public universities from considering race as a factor in college admissions. The litigation over racially-based “affirmative action” put a spotlight on all the ways that white students benefit from non-racially-coded admissions practices, particularly “legacy” admissions, which media outlets dubbed “affirmative action for rich kids”.

The California law will ban admissions offices from “favoring applicants whose family members are graduates of or are significant donors to the school”, which Ting’s office called an “unfair practice often results in a wealthier, less racially diverse student body”.

Advocacy groups that supported the bill called it an important step forward.

In a statement, Helen Iris Torres, CEO of Hispanas Organized for Political Equality, called it “a bold step to dismantle unfair admission practices”.

“Legacy and donor preferences are a recipe for aristocracy, not justice. [The law] is a critical first step toward ensuring that California’s most selective colleges do not further tip the scales in favor of those who already enjoy the most privilege,” Ryan Cieslikowski, a recent Stanford graduate and the lead organizer at Class Action, an organization that fights against inequitable admissions processes, said in a statement.

Across the US, the practice of giving priority university admission to students with family connections is coming under attack from multiple directions. Last year, the US department of education announced it was investigating allegations that Harvard’s admissions process “discriminates on the basis of race by using donor and legacy preferences in its undergraduate admissions process”.

In a complaint against Harvard, Lawyers for Civil Rights, a non-profit based in Boston, argued that students with legacy ties are up to seven times more likely to be admitted to Harvard and can make up nearly a third of a class – and that about 70% are white.

Some high-status private colleges and universities have announced they are voluntarily ending any admissions priority for “legacy” students, including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland; Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

A 2023 study that compared students by test scores and income found that wealth played a tremendous role in getting students admitted to elite private colleges. “Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores,” the study concluded, pointing to private schools’ preference for admitting children of alumni, among other advantages.

Under an earlier California law, also authored by Ting, elite private schools in California had been forced to report how many of the students they admitted had each had benefitted in their applications from a personal connection to a donor or from a family member or members previously attending the school.

In 2023, Stanford reported that 15.4% of its incoming fall 2023 class, or 271 students, had benefitted from a legacy or donor connection, though it said that all of those students had also met the school’s academic standards for admission. “First generation” students, whose parents did not attend college, represented 21.2% of the incoming class, Stanford said.

The University of Southern California, a school that featured prominently in the recent “Varsity Blues” admissions bribery scandal, disclosed that, for its fall 2023 class, it admitted 1,791 students, and enrolled 1,097, based on their relationships to donors or alumni. That was about 14.5% of USC’s admitted students, the Los Angeles Times reported. Like Stanford, USC said that every legacy admit met their academic criteria for admissions.

In signing the legislation into law, the California governor Gavin Newsom said the policy would make higher education in the state more fair: “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” he said in a statement.

The public University of California system eliminated legacy admissions in 1998, Newsom said.

It’s not yet clear how the new anti-legacy laws will play out in practice, since children from wealthy, highly-educated and well-connected families have many different kinds of advantages when approaching the increasingly competitive colleges admissions process.

The supreme court ending “affirmative action” for racial minorities in US college admissions is expected to lead to a decrease in the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds who are admitted to US schools with competitive admissions processes, which is what happened at University of California schools when California voters banned affirmative action in 1996.

The Associated Press contributed reporting