California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a law prohibiting the consideration of legacy and donor status in admissions decisions. The impact will be most felt at a small handful of private colleges and universities, including my own, the University of Southern California (USC).
I view the new policy with the same skepticism with which I viewed the fervor around eliminating test scores and eliminating affirmative action.
Banning legacy admissions is promoted not only as a matter of fairness, but as a strategy for increasing Black, Latino and Native American student enrollment in elite universities after the Supreme Court restricted race-conscious admissions in 2023.
Access to schools like USC and Stanford matters not only symbolically: Graduating from elite schools can provide a pathway to positions of leadership, and it measurably impacts access to future opportunities like graduate school.
Having spent much of my career on efforts to make college access more equitable, especially by designing more fair admissions systems, I view a ban on preferences for legacy students and children of donors with interest. And I strongly support the principle of a firewall between donations and admissions. However, it is unlikely, at least at a wide swath of institutions, to be the solution to racial inequality that some are casting it as.
There is much we can do to address racial inequality, but it won’t be through banning legacy status in the most selective institutions. It won’t be by changing any one factor in admissions.
Refining admissions and reducing inequality are systemic challenges that demand systemic solutions. They defy simple solutions. We need to change combinations of criteria, preferences and practices. We need to customize admissions for different types of colleges and universities — and to address different types of inequality.
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In 2023, roughly 700 colleges and universities nationally said they considered legacy status in admissions. Most were selective schools where admission rates are less than 25 percent. Any emphasis on family connections may seem more aristocratic than meritocratic.
Until access to selective institutions is either fair or equal, the halo effect of elite universities on a resume adds to the sense that any legacy or donor advantages are “affirmative action for the privileged,” as Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez portrayed them.
These issues are distinct from but related to the Varsity Blues scandal, which involved real fraud, and the results of a recent Los Angeles Times investigation, which alleged that USC engaged high-profile donors by admitting their children as walk-on athletes. To be clear: USC asserts that it has made substantive reforms to prevent such abuses and to safeguard the integrity of its admissions process.
Even after Varsity Blues, legacy and donor preferences have persisted. Why? The answer has to do with one of the biggest misconceptions about admissions: that it is simply a task of identifying the academic best of the best.
Selective universities like USC and Stanford receive thousands more applications from academically qualified students than they can possibly admit. It becomes a fool’s errand to split hairs among the “academically best,” so admissions staff look at additional factors.
After assessing applicants’ past performance, considering what each applicant may contribute to the campus and its institutional needs — financial, social, athletic and more — becomes critical.
No single student could embody all the types of excellence that universities want in their students. Overall excellence is achieved by creating an entering class that, collectively, represents varied values and needs.
Diversity of many sorts is considered. Race, like a parent’s alumni or donor status, was part of a longer list of preferences that came into play after academic qualifications had been established.
Related: Maryland becomes the third state to completely ban legacy preference in admissions
On learning how race factored into admissions decisions at the University of Michigan, for example, the US Supreme Court accepted it in the ruling for Grutter vs. Bollinger as “a factor of a factor of a factor” within a “holistic” review process, which they defined as “academic ability coupled with a flexible assessment of applicants’ talents, experiences, and ‘potential to contribute to the learning of those around them.’ ”
Public universities in California have not considered racial status since 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209, banning preferential treatment in admissions based on race, gender and national origin. After seeing a drop in Black and Latino enrollment, the system experimented with race-neutral efforts — such as percent plans, other approaches to holistic review and the consideration of socioeconomic status — to recover diversity losses.
Yet, a decade after Prop 209’s passage, UCLA enrolled only 96 Black first-year students, many of whom were athletes. Research found that although race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action make a positive difference, that difference is smaller than that of considering race directly. And the factors are so controversial that, like lightning rods, they collect all the energy and attention, distracting us from the necessary effort to make systemic change.
I am skeptical that banning legacy preferences will reduce racial inequality. Meaningful gap reduction will require experimenting with and refining combinations of changes in admissions, recruitment and financial aid, not just tweaking a single admissions factor.
We need conversation, research and policy about making combinations of changes, being conscious of how they function in the real world — in concert, like gears.
My own research team found that doctoral programs in the University of California system and at USC affiliated with the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium significantly increased diversity without affirmative action through cycles of discussing, experimenting with, assessing and refining their approaches to both holistic admissions and recruitment.
Admissions and hiring are alike in this crucial way: They may never be fully equitable, and they cannot be counted upon, on their own, to remedy savage inequalities in society. Still, we can and must design more fair processes. We can do so by elevating the conversation — and the goal — above changing individual factors.
Julie Posselt is a professor of education at the University of Southern California, associate dean of the USC Graduate School and executive director of the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice (CERPP)
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a law prohibiting the consideration of legacy and donor status in admissions decisions. The impact will be most felt at a small handful of private colleges and universities, including my own, the University of Southern California (USC). I view the new policy with the same skepticism with which I
The post OPINION: Why I view the ban on legacy admissions at California’s private universities with skepticism appeared first on The Hechinger Report. Higher Education, Opinion, Race and Equity, Solutions, Data and research, Graduate education, Higher education access, Law and policy, Race The Hechinger Report
