California Passes Bill Banning Legacy Admissions at Private Colleges

• The California State Assembly passed a bill to eliminate legacy admissions at private colleges.
• California's public colleges already are prohibited from giving preferences to legacy applicants.
• Only a handful of private colleges in California have policies favoring legacies.
• Scrutiny of legacy policies has intensified since the Supreme Court's ban on affirmative action.

California is poised to join the parade of states prohibiting legacy admissions, but this latest legislative effort specifically targets private higher education.

That's because California has already banned legacy preferences at public universities.

On Aug. 28, the California State Assembly passed Assembly Bill 1780, which aims to "prohibit an independent institution of higher education … from providing a legacy preference or donor preference in admissions … to an applicant as part of the regular or early action admissions process."

The State Senate voted 26-5 to approve the bill. It was then sent back to the Assembly for a concurring vote before moving to Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk for consideration. He has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the bill.

In recent years, Illinois, Virginia, Colorado, and Maryland have passed legislation banning legacy preferences. Of those states, only Maryland now prohibits legacy preferences at private colleges along with publics.

As such, California would become the first state to enact a ban squarely targeting private colleges and universities, affecting institutions such as Stanford University, the University of Southern California (USC), and Harvey Mudd College. The California Institute of Technology already doesn't favor legacy applicants, and Pomona College and Occidental College have also jettisoned the practice.

At Stanford, however, 13.6% of the class entering in fall 2023 were either legacies or had family connections to donors. In 2022, the corresponding figure for USC was 14.4%. The Assembly bill prohibits preferences based on philanthropy as well.

"We want to make sure that everyone's getting in because of their own merit, because of their grades, their test scores, what they provide to that institution, not because of their pocketbooks, of their parents or their family members," Assemblymember Philip Ting, the bill's author, said during a legislative session.

Institutions failing to comply with the law would be listed on the state's Department of Justice website. That's it. Previous iterations of the bill included financial penalties, in some cases upwards of several million dollars, for colleges that continued favoring legacy applicants.

The legislation references last summer's landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious admissions, noting that legacy admissions have since come under intense scrutiny. Now that colleges can no longer consider race as a "plus" factor in admissions decisions, campus diversity promises to suffer.

In fact, recent data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrates the extent to which underrepresented minority enrollments may drop among selective universities now that affirmative action has been deemed unconstitutional.

Studies have shown that legacy policies tend to favor white, wealthy applicants, perpetuating racial and wealth gaps at a time when colleges are scrambling to maintain student diversity and, in some cases, using family income as a proxy for race.

Given that this law effectively pertains to about half a dozen California colleges that collectively enroll only a few thousand legacy students, its value is largely symbolic.

But while enacting the law might not dramatically affect the racial and socioeconomic makeup of those student bodies, it would signal that leveling the admissions playing field remains a high priority in light of the challenges universities now face and the societal implications of equal access to educational opportunity.

The governor has until the end of September to sign the bill into law. If he does, it will take effect Sept. 1, 2025.

Meanwhile, will Stanford and other private colleges and universities in California lobby to block the bill, much like Yale University and other privates did successfully in Connecticut? And will similar measures in Massachusetts and New York gain momentum?

For a growing number of legislators, legacy admissions no longer pass the smell test. Many considered them foul even before the SCOTUS decision, and they've only grown more pungent since.