On August 28, California’s Legislature passed a bill that barred the state’s private nonprofit colleges from making admissions based on whether family members of students donated money to the school or had attended it themselves.
If Governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill, the state will join four others that made legacy admissions preferences illegal for private and public institutions. Bill backers say this legislation will serve as a necessary corrective to last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned all but military colleges from using race as a factor in admissions.
Assemblymember Philip Ting (D) from San Francisco wrote Assembly Bill 1780 to ban legacy admissions in response to that Supreme Court Ruling.
“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,” Ting said during a legislative voting session in May.
The Supreme Court undid nearly 50 years of precedence that allowed college admissions offices to consider a student’s racial or ethnic background in an effort to promote campus diversity. In the state of California, the ruling affected just a handful of private colleges that used affirmative action. Voters in 1996 changed the state’s constitution to forbid public schools from using race as a factor during the admissions process.
Ting’s bill would affect a few colleges. However, like the Supreme Court case, bill backers say this legislation could be a force in influencing the decision of low-income high school students and students of color to apply for college.
“I think that it is fair to say that there are a smaller number of colleges that will be impacted by enrollment slots that will change as a result of this legislative action,” Jessie Ryan, president of The Campaign for College Opportunity, a California advocacy and research organization that co-sponsored Ting’s bill, was quoted as saying.
Although few enrollment slots are affected by the bill, Ryan states that this misses the bigger picture. With any effort that shows a student’s wealth doesn’t affect admissions, “you’re doing something bigger related to culture and (social) fabric as students are questioning the value of college altogether and whether or not they want to pursue a higher education,” she stated.
Others have said it’s still too early to state that this bill, or the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, will affect students’ decision to attend college. Ting’s bill, in part, is the Legislature’s reminder to colleges that they “do have a role in providing oversight and accountability for ensuring that higher education is accessible to those who are not just from wealthy backgrounds,” Steve Desir, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California who works to study racial equity issues, said.
Last year, more than 25,000 California students received around $230 million in partial tuition waivers to attend private colleges. Desir doesn’t think the research is clear on whether the end of legacy admissions changes student behavior “because that’s kind of a new area.”
For Desir, other decisions, like additional financial aid or eliminating SAT scores in admissions, are stronger signals that college is accessible to students, in part because students are more directly engaged in filling out forms for grants or in studying for standardized tests.
Ting’s bill, if signed, would take effect within the next year. After September 1, 2025, schools will no longer be able to use an applicant’s legacy or donor connection as a factor in admissions, a spokesperson for Ting wrote.
