And I’m not a lawyer but I suspect that if we’re talking about private schools, the legal argument is that the autonomy of private institutions is a well-established principle in U.S. law. Private colleges are free to set their own policies, including admissions criteria, so long as they comply with broad federal laws (such as civil rights protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964). The state cannot impose its own preferences or policies on these institutions, as long as the colleges do not violate existing federal laws or constitutional protections.
There is actually a supreme court precedent Dartmouth College v. Woodward, that upheld that private institutions have the right to govern themselves without state interference, protecting their internal decision-making, including admissions policies.
Sure, but the numbers are still relatively high, per the article:
Self-reported numbers showed that in 2022, USC admitted the highest percentage of students with legacy and donor ties of any California university, 14.4 percent. It was followed by Stanford and Santa Clara, where those numbers were 13.8 percent and 13.1 percent respectively.
Also important to note this doesn’t have an impact on CSUs and UCs, neither of which consider legacy:
Public universities in California won’t be affected by the change. California State University does not consider legacy or donor ties, and the University of California system stopped doing so in 1998, two years after California voters banned race-conscious admissions through a statewide ballot measure.
And just to be clear, since there’s no actual penalty for private colleges to continue to use legacy admissions, the law seems to be mostly for show.
The penalty seems to be limited to “being reported on the Department of Justice’s web site.” So no one will care since that info is in the Common Data set anyway.
And launching a lawsuit to protect legacy and donor admissions would most likely be a PR disaster given how unpopular they tend to be among the general public.
Yes, money can be used to buy opportunities to gain better college admission credentials and remove barriers against achievement. Of course, the difference between that and past practice where parental status or wealth alone was enough is that the kid now has to do some earning of merit, even if they start on third base (and they have to run fast enough not to be overtaken by too many kids from upper middle class families starting on second base).
So the Cal State schools never considered legacy status and the UCs haven’t considered it in decades. When Governor Newsom says, “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few” he is making it very clear (as a graduate of Santa Clara) that a public school education is radically inferior to that of a highly selective private institution, or else this wouldn’t be necessary. Phil Ting (who got his Masters at Harvard) obviously agrees.
I personally disagree with them both. Will my CC Username be posted to the California Department of Justice Wall of Shame?
I think that’s reading way too much into his statement. And for this assertion to be true, legacy status would have to be a very significant factor in getting accepted into schools like Stanford (and that doesn’t seem to be the case). 13.8% of the undergraduate class having legacy status doesn’t mean those students were admitted primarily because of their status. Correlation does not equal causation.
My view is that this is all political theater. A “feel good” law with no teeth.
Sometimes people do the right things for the right reasons. Sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons. However, when someone does the right thing, perhaps we would be best off to just be thankful and not even think about why they did it.
I think that banning legacy admissions is a good thing to do.
One issue is that some of the top ranked universities (MIT and Caltech come to mind) are academically very challenging. Students should not want to go there unless they earn their admissions based on their own qualifications. Of course MIT already does not consider legacy status, and presumably Caltech is affected by this ban. I do not personally know whether Caltech used to consider legacy admissions, but if they don’t in the future that is IMHO a good thing. I think that other highly ranked universities are also pretty challenging. If one of my daughters were to have gone to a school where they are legacy I would have wanted them to earn their admissions on their own merit.
Also, I think that even if a highly ranked university does not consider legacy status, I think that there are still some advantages to having parents who at least went to a similarly very good university. We know what we did to get admitted years ago. Maybe our understanding of the reasons that we got accepted way back then is not perfect, but at least we have some clue. Some of this will have rubbed off on our kids. Universities do not need to also give additional legacy preference.
Above their is a discussion of how money can buy an advantage. I think that this is true. However, even without money, having parents who already did it also conveys an advantage. We know how hard we had to work. We know how much we had to seek out extra help. We know that we did the ECs that were right for us even if they were unconventional, and we know that this seemed to work.
I have wondered whether a top school such as Stanford or USC might be reluctant to end legacy preference for fear of annoying their alumni (and potential future contributors). Since the state has made them do it, alumni don’t have grounds to blame the school (although I personally wouldn’t have blamed them anyway).
Whether this law has any teeth in it is another issue, which I am not qualified to comment on.
Dartmouth College v Woodward was in 1819, construed the Contracts Clause of the Constitution and was decided by Chief Justice Marshall after hearing arguments from Daniel Webster. Just pointing that out for those who did not immediately recognize this. It may not be on point but it is the same principle --the state has limits on regulating private institutions. California cannot ban Stanford from accepting out of state residents, while it could say a public university is only for California residents. There is a difference
Interesting point about legislating private institutions. Wonder if faculty apply for any state funded grants if they will be declined? Or can’t the state fine them ? They are required to submit some annual compliance form.
Even in the absence of any additional admission about admissions*, alumni of highly selective universities tend to have high educational attainment and are more likely to have high SES. Kids with such families generally tend to have various advantages (both nature and nurture tend to be in their favor, regardless of which you think is more or less influential) over first-generation-to-college kids and those from low SES families. Hence the often repeated statement that legacy applicants are often stronger than the overall applicant pool, even though colleges that give legacy preference have legacy admits who would not have been admitted otherwise. It also means that, in the absence of legacy preference, a highly selective college that attracts legacy applicants may still have significant overrepresentation of legacies due to the advantages that the legacy applicants had in building up their college admission credentials.
*Alumni telling their kids about all of the college traditions etc. may have more of an effect at colleges where “level of interest” is considered, especially if a “why [this college]?” essay is used in the application.
Stanford has a 27B endowment that it pays 1.4% tax on, the donations to that endowment are tax deductible. That’s because their job is to educate the public hence the break in taxes since it’s a public good. Now if they don’t want to educate the general public they are welcome to only admit 100% legacy students in which case I don’t think they are an educational institution more of a private club so they should pay the normal taxes any company pays.
Legacy admission is just stanford alumni getting a free ride on the public dollars. Glad CA is putting a stop to it.
And quite frankly this is the easiest thing to get around. If a child of an influential alum is applying, the development office will just tell admissions. The lack of a box on the common app will mean nothing especially as most non-donating alumni children have no real advantage today anyway.
