A new ban on legacy admissions at private universities in California

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1780 this week. It bans legacy and donor admissions at private universities in California, including USC.

By Sheridan Hunter, Gricelda Gallardo, and Jadon Frank

October 01, 2024 at 6:43PM PDT

The college admissions process has undergone big changes in recent years, including the Supreme Court’s reversal of affirmative action last year and test-blind colleges. Now in California, there’s one more change: an end to legacy and donor admissions to private universities.

The bill was authored by Assemblymember Phil Ting, a Democrat representing District 19 in San Francisco. Ting said the idea behind the law is equity.

“With the Supreme Court outlawing affirmative action and not allowing any university in the United States to look at race as a factor in admissions, this completely kept open the door that wealth could be a factor in admissions,” Ting said.

Ting said the new law promotes equal educational opportunities for everyone, not just a lucky few.

“Wealth is a major factor in admissions,” he said. “Especially for the wealthiest one percent of families in the country, where you have students coming from families from the top one percent being twice as likely to be admitted into an elite university than everybody else from the bottom 99 percent.”

Wealth already factors into preparing students for college in other ways, Ting said.

“Already, the wealthiest one percent have a large advantage in terms of schools, extracurriculars, opportunities,” he said.

Ting hopes the new law will help level the playing field. So does Lyndsey Hobelmann, a law student at USC.

“It allows for more students who are qualified in terms of test scores or GPAs to get in when, maybe in the past, those spots were taken by legacy admissions,” Hobelmann said.

Quincy Washington, a freshman majoring in business administration, shared similar sentiments.

“Honestly, just coming from a student that doesn’t come from a household of wealth, I kind of agree,” Washington said. “I feel like you shouldn’t be able to just pay your way into the school. I don’t think that’s the right way.”

For Washington, the right way went like this: “I [worked] my butt off in high school, and [did] a lot of extracurricular activities just to get here, and not just get here because your parents went here, or how much money you have that you paid to the school,” he said.

The new law takes effect September 1, 2025.