San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)
Private colleges admitting fewer legacies
Report: Most schools no longer are giving preferential treatment
Universities across the country lost the right to consider the race of applicants in admissions decisions last year when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in higher education.
But five California private schools, including Stanford and Santa Clara universities, continue to give preferential treatment to the children of alumni or wealthy donors who apply for admission, which was not part of the court’s ban.
California universities that consider such “legacies” have been required to disclose annually the details of their admissions since 2020, beginning with the class entering in 2019. That five-year law, which expires this year, was prompted by Varsity Blues, the admissions scandal that rocked the country when it was revealed that wealthy parents cheated to get their children into Stanford, University of California and other prestigious schools. One method was by donating to the schools.
The new reports, released Friday, indicate that most universities don’t give preferential treatment to the children of donors or alumni.
But a bill making its way through the Legislature, AB1780, would, for the first time, outlaw legacy and donor-driven admissions entirely as of Sept. 1, 2025, including at private institutions.
Schools that continued the practice would be punished, as of June 30, 2026, by having to provide even more detail than the expiring law requires, such as disclosing donor status, income brackets and other information about the admitted students.
Earlier versions of the bill had stronger punishments, including civil fines amounting to millions of dollars a year.
“The enforcement mechanism would be a lawsuit,” said the bill’s author, Assembly Member Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, who also wrote the 2019 reporting law.
“This is affirmative action for the wealthiest Americans,” Ting said of legacy admissions. “These are not private clubs. These institutions change the trajectory of people’s lives and impact their earnings. Showing preference to the wealthiest is to hurt the ability of the middle class to improve their economic situation.”
The Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities, which releases the colleges’ legacy admissions numbers in a single report, opposes AB1780.
Although most of the association’s objections dealt with earlier consequences that are now gone from the bill, Kristen Soares, the group’s president, told state lawmakers that the enhanced reporting requirements could violate students’ privacy.
“We do not believe that the information can be shared from the student file due to significant restrictions” on disclosing data from the Internal Revenue Service, Soares wrote to the Senate Education Committee last month, noting that her association shares concerns about the loss of affirmative action.
The association released the final round of legacy reports for five campuses that practice legacy and donor admissions, although not for Stanford, which releases its own: Santa Clara University, the University of Southern California, Northeastern University Oakland (formerly Mills College), Claremont McKenna College and Harvey Mudd College.
The group said 66 other private schools gave no preferential treatment to the relatives of alumni or to donors for fall 2023, the admissions period covered by the final reports.
Among those that did, none reported admitting students who failed to satisfy the university’s admissions requirements. Last year, by contrast, USC, Pepperdine and Vanguard each invited underqualified students to enroll, based on their connections.
In its separate legacy report, Stanford said it admitted 295 children of alumni in fall 2023, all of whom met the university’s admissions standards.
Those admits represented 13.6% of all undergraduates admitted, compared with 14.4% admitted in fall 2021, or 324 students.
At that time, Stanford reported, another 20 admits had no previous affiliation with the school but had relatives with “a history of philanthropy.” Although the current report doesn’t break out students whose families donated money to Stanford, it says that applications “may contain” a note about donation history.
The state of California doesn’t yet ban legacy admissions, but its public universities eschew them. The California State University system has said it does not consider applicants’ relatives or donations, while the University of California regents banned such preferences in 1998.
In 2020, a state audit found that UC Berkeley had admitted at least 55 underqualified students based on connections and donations. A Chronicle report then revealed that a UC regent, the late Richard Blum, had been helping friends and family get into the elite public institution for years.
In the current report, the school with the largest number of legacy admissions in 2023 was the University of Southern California, with 1,791.
Santa Clara University reported far fewer, 38. Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd, both in Claremont (Los Angeles County) each admitted 15 wellconnected students. Northeastern University Oakland, on the site of the former Mills, admitted fewer than 10.
Not all of the legacy students admitted to the schools actually enrolled, although most did, according to the reports.