When the Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious college admissions, Jonathan Lam was in a bridge program at Cornell University for students from underrepresented backgrounds. The Court's landmark decision seemed like an affront to this sort of program, which was designed to help first-generation students and students of color, among others, transition into the highly selective Ivy League university system. Devastated by the ruling, Lam began to mobilize with other student activists against what they feel is a more pressing concern in the college acceptance process: the practice of legacy admissions.
“Legacy preference” refers to the boost to a prospective student’s chances of admission if they are related to an alumnus, often a parent or grandparent. The origin of legacy admissions stems from an antisemitic backlash to rising Jewish enrollment within elite higher education institutions in the 1920s. Advocacy groups have criticized the exclusionary practice for favoring white and wealthy students over students of color and first-generation students.
A 2023 study from academics working with the National Bureau of Economic research found that legacy students are far more likely to come from families in the 1% income level. Students from this background are five times as likely to be admitted to elite, highly selective universities as non-legacy applicants with similar test scores, demographic characteristics, and admissions ratings.
The practice came under renewed scrutiny after the Supreme Court decision to essentially ban the consideration of race in college admissions. In the wake of that June 2023 ruling, several universities have since reported a decline in the racial diversity of their incoming classes.
Steve Stemler, a professor of education studies and psychology at Wesleyan University, describes this backlash as inevitable. “If legacy status, which is more or less a proxy to race, is a factor that you’re able to count, but race is not, people will start to say there’s a logical inconsistency here,” Stemler tells Teen Vogue.
Now there’s a growing movement by state legislatures and institutions to do away with legacy admissions, with California recently becoming the second state, after Maryland, to pass legislation banning the practice at private and public universities. California's decision comes at a time when the American public is increasingly skeptical that legacy admissions should continue to exist. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that 75% of Americans believe legacy status should not be a factor in college admissions.
Ending legacy preferences in college admissions also has some bipartisan support in Congress. “There’s a strong consensus from every political point of view," Stemler says. "It probably doesn’t make sense to have legacy admissions in 2024.”
Even before that 2023 Supreme Court ruling, a number of higher education institutions had ended the practice of legacy admissions — though some university administrators have continued to defend the policy. Proponents of legacy admissions argue that legacy status is a fair consideration in a holistic admissions process and that a ban would impede the autonomy of universities to shape their campus community.
In a letter announcing Wesleyan’s decision to do away with the practice, however, university president Michael Roth wrote, “An applicant’s connection to a Wesleyan graduate indicates little about that applicant’s ability to succeed at the University.”
Johns Hopkins University reported an increase in first-generation and low-income students after it eliminated legacy admissions. “Since 2013, the percentage of students in our incoming classes who have a family connection has decreased from 8.5% to 1.7%. During the same period, the percentage of first-generation or limited-income students rose from 16.7% to 30.8%,” Ronald Daniels, the university’s president, said last year on LinkedIn.
Earlier this year, Daniels also co-authored an op-ed with Tom Stritikus, the president of Occidental College, in which they urged other universities to eliminate legacy admissions. They argued that ending the practice will expand opportunities for all students, a move they say is increasingly urgent in the wake of affirmative action’s demise.
“Our institutions both ended legacy preferences as a first step to remediating these glaring inequities and repairing rapidly crumbling levels of trust,” Daniels and Stritikus wrote for Inside Higher Ed. “Others should not simply wait for government to take the initiative, especially when an overwhelming majority of state legislatures have not acted on the issue and federal efforts have languished time and again.”
Motivated by the Supreme Court's ban on race-conscious admissions, Lawyers for Civil Rights, in representation for several advocacy groups, filed a Title VI complaint against Harvard University for its use of legacy admissions. The July 2023 complaint argues that since nearly 70% of the university’s legacy and donor-related applicants are white, the practice discriminates against students of color. Later that month, the Education Department opened a civil rights investigation into the claim.
“We’ve been in ongoing contact with [the federal government] since," Oren Sellstrom, litigation director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, tells Teen Vogue, "so we know that they are actively investigating the matter. No conclusion has been reached to date, however.”
Sellstrom calls the California legislation “one more step in the right direction” of banning legacy and donor admissions as “unfair and undeserved.” Stanford University and University of Southern California are two highly selective universities that will be impacted by the new law, which will take effect in September 2025. Roughly 14% of the universities’ 2023 and 2024 entering classes were legacy students, according to the latest available data.
Valerie Johnson, the legislative affairs manager of the Campaign for College Opportunity, which helped push the California bill, says, “Our young population is hugely diverse. When they’re able to go to college, they don’t just represent themselves. This bill is opening doors for them, for their families, for their communities, and that’s something I’m personally excited about as an impact of our work.”
Legislators in other states are hopeful that California’s decision will galvanize the movement against legacy preferences elsewhere. Democratic senator Andrew Gounardes of New York is a sponsor of a bill that would end legacy admissions in his state. “New York has, by our account, the greatest number of exclusionary college admissions practices," Senator Gounardes tells Teen Vogue. "Seeing California take this step is helpful to our cause.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has been in talks with organizations in California, such as the Campaign for College Opportunity, in hopes of replicating their legislative success. Jake Martinez, deputy director for campaigns and strategy of the Education Policy Center at NYCLU, says public outrage is growing as the consequences of affirmative action’s demise become clear. “People are outraged by this and they want to do something about it," he tells Teen Vogue. "And the way to do that is to eliminate these unfair practices like legacy admissions, which are counterproductive to ensuring we have these diverse classes.”
At Cornell University, student Jonathan Lam is working with the NYCLU to advocate for the Fair College Admissions bill by educating other students and lobbying legislators. “What’s made this bill very different in comparison to a lot of other state legislation is that our bill has a penalty," Lam explains. "If schools continue to use legacy admissions, a certain percentage of their finances would go into the TAP program, which is a tuition assistance program that would mostly help low-income students be able to attend college.”
For Lam the movement to end legacy admissions is personal. The son of Vietnamese refugees, he emphasizes how the Southeast Asian community is harmed by exclusionary practices within the college admissions process. “Institutions like MIT and Cornell are seeing how the end of affirmative action has impacted their demographics," he says. "I think that’s why I feel very connected to this, especially coming from the Southeast Asian American community. A lot of people in our community have not been able to attend college.”
Lam is optimistic that the bill will help reverse the decline in racial and socioeconomic diversity in New York’s higher education institutions if it becomes law. Beyond the preliminary step of ending legacy admissions, Lam notes, he’s interested in working to address the inaccessibility of the college admissions process more broadly.
Lam recalls not having access to SAT and ACT test preparation and private college counseling, which made it more difficult for him to understand the university application process. He credits Thrive Scholars, a nonprofit organization supporting high-achieving and first-generation students of color, for helping him navigate the admissions process. While many universities did suspend their standardized testing requirements during the pandemic, some have since reversed this policy.
Other experts are also hopeful about the future of college admissions and more comprehensive methods for assessing potential students. Stemler, whose research focuses on educational assessment, particularly in college admissions, explains that traditional admission tests have historically favored students with the resources to prepare for them. University admissions, he says, should use other metrics to measure their potential for success. “When you measure broader things such as creativity and practical intelligence, you reduce the differences in achievement that you see on traditional tests,” Stemler points out.
Lam hopes that the Southeast Asian community will become more visible in the greater conversation about inequity. “The most frustrating part is when people are just viewing me as a woke Asian student advocating against legacy admissions," he says, "when there’s a bigger picture and a bigger community that I’m part of that is not part of this higher education process.”
Whether these efforts pay off remains to be seen in Albany, but Lam is hopeful. “In the last legislative cycle, there [were] still a lot of talking points that I feel like weren’t developed,” he says. “Once we bring the facts to the table and have these conversations, I believe there will be a different outcome this next time around.”
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