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.
I understand that donors/alumni want their kids to have tiebreaker rights. But it should have been banned the moment the DEI considerations were outright banned.
Not sure on all the specifics of CA’s admittance structure, beyond they banned race base admission in the '90s in favor of a system that guaranteed admissions to top percentile students.
But post Students for Fair Admissions DEI measures are still ok. Schools can’t use race alone as a plus or minus but they may choose to favor those from disadvantaged neighborhoods, 1st generation college students, and even good essays that share someone’s experience being a race.
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.
Sounds like the state is just giving the violators free advertising to potential donors who want to exploit the practice.
Perhaps, or I wonder if it might lead to lawsuits in regard to the fairness of the practice.
Yeah, this seems like, “we don’t care unless you care; we’re just giving you information so you know whether or not you care”
Wait but I was told that rich white people didn’t have special privilege and that we had solved racism! I thought generational wealth had nothing to do with anything!
Christ the fact that that’s only being addressed now is insane to me. I thought it was just done quitely, I didn’t realize it was actually fully allowed.
How was this not illegal already?
There was nothing prohibiting it.
Taxes? I don’t know full details or if this is even tangentially related (or maybe it is the same thing). There is a supposed practice as some universities (maybe just the non-UC’s and Cal State’s) that if you were a relative (I’m assuming immediate family only) working at say USC for example, you could get accepted into the university without paying tuition. The only catch was you got severely taxed (something like 30%; of what, I don’t know) for attending tuition-free.
You can get a discount from universities if a spouse works there, but that’s not the same as getting accepted automatically.
BUT THE PRODUCT OF MY SPERM!!!
Good. Now we should also stop giving free tuition to faculties children. But maybe that’s just my opinion.
I’ve heard supposedly those people got severely taxed for doing that.
