California bans legacy admissions at all colleges

SACRAMENTO, California — It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a ban on the practice known as legacy admissions, a change that will affect prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the University of Southern California.

California’s law, which will take effect Sept. 1, 2025, is the nation’s fifth legacy admissions ban, but only the second that will apply to private colleges.

“In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work," Newsom said in a statement. "The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”

Like other states, California won’t financially penalize violators, but it will post the names of violators on the state Department of Justice’s website.

California will also add to data reporting requirements that it implemented in 2022, when private colleges had to start sharing the percentage of admitted students who were related to donors and alumni. Schools that run afoul of the new law will also have to report more granular demographic information about their incoming classes to the state, including the race and income of enrolled students as well as their participation in athletics.

“We have major private universities who use a significant portion of their admissions pool to help legacy and donors get admitted,” said Assemblymember Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat who carried the legislation and first attempted to ban the practice after the Varsity Blues scandal. “We really need to make their admissions policies much more equitable.”

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.

Those universities didn’t take official positions on the legislation when it was still pending, but already, USC has said it would comply if the law was signed.

“We continuously evolve our recruitment, admission and financial aid programs to create a student body that is diverse in all respects, and to comply with the law as it develops in this area,” USC recently said in a statement.

The Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, which represents all three schools, resisted the law. It fought proposed financial penalties, which were eventually removed. Then it focused its lobbying on new reporting requirements for violators, calling some of them irrelevant or problematic.

Students’ family income data is locked up by IRS privacy requirements, and athletic recruitment — though a piece of illegal bribes in the Varsity Blues scandal — is separate from legacy admissions, the group argued in letters to lawmakers.

“While we believe all institutions will comply with the bill provisions, we believe it is important to ensure that what is being required in the reporting language is both achievable and relevant,” association President Kristen Soares wrote to the Senate Appropriations Committee in June.

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.