> Important to note that this is the only enforcement mechanism. You get put on a naughty list

"In 2019...[Assemblyman Phil] Ting tried to push through a bill banning legacy preferences in California. That effort fell short. But he did succeed with a measure requiring private colleges to report to the Legislature how many students they admit because of ties to alumni or donors."

This time, "an earlier version [of the bill] had proposed that schools face civil penalties for violating the law, but that provision was removed in the State Senate."

This is a battle against powerful people. Wins will be incremental. About the smartest things those opposing this could have done would have been firing up (a) nihilistic elements about how nothing changes and (b) outrage at anything short of an absolute ban with criminal penalties and forced revocation of degrees to legacy graduates or whatever.

Is it even about shame? Universities are proud of having multiple generations of (wealthy) families attend, and will go out of their way to advertise it.

So… is the way for these institutions to “win” by performing a large scale Prisoner’s Dilemma exercise by all admitting at least one legacy student at the next opportunity?

The naughty list might actually work if they were required to report a demographic breakdown of the legacy admission as well. It would probably be extremely bad PR to point out 93% of students given a free entry pass were white.

> You get put on a naughty list.

I don't see it that way. Sounds more like the state is doing free advertising. "Here is the list of schools Junior, who got a 4.0 in their basket-weaving major in high school, has a shot".

>> which will punish institutions that flout the law by publishing their names on a California Department of Justice website

> Important to note that this is the only enforcement mechanism. You get put on a naughty list.

It's official: the word "ban" has lost all meaning, according to the New York Times.

You can call anything you want a ban now.

They could also stop state backed research funding

It’s possible to sue now. That’s my guess. They just wont get a lawsuit from the DA.

For example if I’m a clearly qualified and another person clearly less qualified then me gets in to Stanford but has a father who donated… I can sue for that because the school would be in violation of the law.

The listed name will clearly mark the school as a violator of the law.

This is, as a left leaning guy myself, one of my general frustrations with our current vintage of progressive thought..

Passing laws with weak enforcement mechanisms that leads to passing more laws with more weak enforcement mechanisms which leads to...

You get the drift

> Will be interesting to see how important that is to the selective universities in the state. I don’t see how being named and shamed on an official government website is much different than the status quo of being named and shamed in a media report on legacy admissions.

That government website will become ammunition for bad press, which will be driven by disgruntled parents (of which there are many). The list itself they don't care about, it'll be the downstream actors who do something with it which will create the problems.

Once those problems start landing, the schools will change their behavior to get off that list (but continue their selective admission shenanigans however possible).

Seems strange the government can enforce such a thing on private organizations.

How would they even determine? Would need to prove that a legacy is clearly underwhelming.

If I ran an organization, I'd probably prefer the ability to accept family members and donors.

It will only matter to alumni donors. Friends of mine both graduated from the same institution. Their plan with donations was to use their corporate 3x match plus their own wealth to set their daughters up with admission locks.

And of course why should they be able to enforce it? The government should have zero business interfering in private university application processes.

I think reframing it as a consumer protection disclosure is fine

Maybe they only way for them to mandate it was to only gain leverage after an action was found, as opposed to forcing them to report the action

Considering that they already publish how many legacy students each university takes each year, this law doesn't really do anything new other that stronger wording.

Newsome really seems to be trying to stay in the headlines these days. Seems like a new law notable enough for headlines signed every day the past week or so.

I could see this working for the majority of people who donate money but not millions. If you donate millions your kid will get in, they will find a way.

This is a good incremental step though. Once some colleges are on the list, it'll be easier to stir up some populist rancor.

It's not hard to imagine that there will be a push to include this information in college rankings.

The main difference is that the media report will be read.

For all the attention maybe there's changes planned.

Yeah that sucks. I'm all for private institutions doing whatever they feel like, but schools like Stanford get a lot of privileges from the state, e.g. they have a charter of incorporation to have their own city. The state could revoke the city charter and revert jurisprudence to the county, for example.

Or it ends up acting like an advert for those universities.

>You get put on a naughty list.

Might actually help kids pick where to apply and where not to, in the unintended way. Which institutions are meritocratic at best or "woke captured" at worst, and which are invested in perpetuating a ruling class

The problem with this approach is that the private universities still get benefits of federal funding through student aids and research grants. If no federal money was used for the undergraduate students, I would have no problem with this. Private university can do whatever they want with their admission as long as no public money is spent on the admission process and the admitted students.

This is a fun platitude but what does it actually mean? How does this… relationship play out?

Legacy kids are pretty smart. The median SAT score for legacy Princeton admissions is between 1525-1585 (the average is 1535 for Princeton overall). GPA is similarly very high.

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2023/07/princeton-...

Luckily, one of the greatest movies of the 21st century is about this very dynamic. It's called The Social Network. It has very little to do with the real historical personage of Mark Zuckerberg but it totally captures the toxic parasitic relationship between the upwardly mobile regular rich kids and the aristocracy at an institution like Harvard. It doesn't end well for anybody.

Also, the presence of multigenerational participants in an institution help it to develop unique traditions and culture that improve it in ways that are hard to articulate and measure, which I will artlessly describe as the opposite of the feeling you get from going to the DMV to renew your driver's license.

unfortunately for this narrative, there are lots of smart rich people, for obvious reasons

California does not have any Ivy League universities.

Yep. It's a cliche that the token scholarship students are paid to do the homework of and take the tests for the rich kids.

Large public research universities (in STEM) skew to far more rigorous than Ivies because they're always clamoring for prestige and ranking because of their inherent insecurities about not being said Ivy. Little/no grade inflation and less homework and test trafficking. TLDR: Generally, people who put in the work and get things done went to state schools; while people who earn MBAs and found companies like Theranos and FTX go to big name private schools.

That’s the beauty of the system. It’s mutually beneficial.

> institutions' membership or selection criteria is pretty fundamental to their right to exist

Private universities enjoy tremendous benefits on account of their public benefits. If they want to have virtual sovereignty in how they admit students, they should be taxed and regulated like any other business.

> Especially when the whole point of a "private" university is their exclusivity. Not only that they will lose their appeal in the first place, this has the potential to really mess up their endowments.

Tell that to MIT or CMU - both of whom do NOT accept legacy admissions on principle (George Eastman and Andrew Carnegie being self made men).

They're both doing fine.

> I get annoyed by legacy admissions as much as the next guy, but this strikes me as problematic. An institutions' membership or selection criteria is pretty fundamental to their right to exist.

> Especially when the whole point of a "private" university is their exclusivity.

MIT is a private university that does not do legacy admissions, yet it has no problem maintaining its existence or its exclusivity.

The students are people who work really hard and those who were born right.

That second group, why are they there?

Let's not let some abstract amorphous principle about some legal fiction prevent us from fixing things.

> It's an ironic problem because California's public colleges already have an exclusivity problem.

Can you please go into a little more detail about the irony you see, because as someone who works at a public university, it's not obvious to me.

IANAL, but this is from the linked bill text:

> (2) “Independent institution of higher education” means a nonpublic higher education institution that grants undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, or both, that is formed as a nonprofit corporation in this state, that is accredited by an agency recognized by the United States Department of Education, and that receives, or benefits from, state-funded student financial assistance or that enrolls students who receive state-funded student financial assistance.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...

Seems like an institution is free to be fully private (not take state funded financial aid) and do whatever they want.

Every private university takes tons of public cash for research. The most prestigious and exclusive private universities take the greatest amount public research funding. If an institution wants to play the "but we're private!" card, I'd say let them, but only if it means they are not eligible for public research funding.

They’re tax exempt organizations. I don’t think they have a “right to exist” nor to have absolute control of association just like we don’t allow their directors to self deal.

They are allowed to exist because they provide the public a benefit, which is degraded by legacy admissions depriving the deserving members of the general public of those slots.

If private universities are doing actual important research, it's government funded. This is a reasonable condition of funding.

Your other point is valid though: Public universities could set an example and compete more effectively for students who would otherwise go to a private university by increasing capacity.

I tend to agree. There is a lot that occurs in the private sphere that should be free of governmental influence, even if the consensus is that it would be better for society if they were organized or behaved in a different way.

They are still free to choose their membership however they want.

The ‘punishment’ for breaking this law is to be listed on a website, so no one is stopping these schools from doing whatever they want, they will just be on a public list.

Now apply this to every private business and their hiring practices and let me know how things shake out and whether people are happy about the results.

There are a lot of private universities most nobody cares about. Without looking it up what is your opinion of Drake university? I'm sore most of us the answer is 'who'. (i hadn't heard of them either until I moved nearby. they claim they are great but who knows - not me)

most of us have heard good things about stanford. They won't lose any reputation because that isn't what it is built on. Drake isn't in california but even if they were not being on this list (if they are not I don't know) wouldn't make anyone not go.

> I get annoyed by legacy admissions as much as the next guy, but this strikes me as problematic. An institutions' membership or selection criteria is pretty fundamental to their right to exist.

Eh, it's pretty fundamental to KKK's right to exist! Businesses (e.g., US colleges) have to comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts which curtail what they can set as their selection criteria.

[dead]

There are universities for which that would be a valid argument. They are expensive places to store mediocre children of the wealthy and are deigned for purpose.

More prestigious private universities use a lot of government funding to fund widely cited research which is what makes them prestigious.

Are not all universities "they paid a lot so we let them in"? I mean, there are subsidies and scholarships, but by and large it is pay to play.

now... when it is "they paid a lot so we gave them a degree" that is when you have a problem.

Just make it outright auction. And release the name of student and how much were bid for admission. Seems the fairest route.

Because that's not what's happening here. They're saying "you had a family member graduate here, so we aren't going to expect the same academic prerequisites for your entry".

That means that a high-achieving student with uneducated parents will get rejected, while a low-performing student with a parent who is an alumni still gets admitted.

This, for an institution that is accredited by the state, that offers credentials that are widely treated as societal merit, represents a profound form of economic discrimination. It also completely destroys any illusion that the college's application process is meritocratic, which is a fundamental assumption of the system at large.

This system in inherently racist, because there are plenty of kids getting admitted because their parents or grandparents are alumni. That means that white kids are getting an easy entry to an elite school because their white parents or grandparents, who were born before the end of segregation, attended and graduated from that school before Black Americans were even allowed to enroll.

With our extremist SCOTUS now stripping Black Americans of the benefit of Affirmative Action, the only measure that actively leveled the playing field, tearing down this discriminatory system is more important than ever. Especially since these elite schools largely require familial elitism and socioeconomic superiority to qualify for admission, leading to the demographics of students at these schools to sway far whiter than the general college-attending population (because Black people are actively being discriminated against because of the nature of their familial history).

It might also be that their family contributed to the success and reputation of the university for a few generations. As small as that contribution might be, there could be merit in it.

> Considering "they paid a lot so we let them in" is perfectly valid and legal selection criteria at private schools and universities, I fail to see how legislation like this is going to matter

(b)(1) "'Donor preference in admissions' means considering an applicant’s relation to a donor of, or a donation to, the independent institution of higher education as a factor in the admissions process, including asking an applicant to indicate their family’s donor status and including that information among the documents that the independent institution of higher education uses to consider an applicant for admission.

...

(c) Commencing September 1, 2025, an independent institution of higher education shall not provide a legacy preference or donor preference in admissions to an applicant as part of the regular or early action admissions process."

§ 66018.4(b) and (c) of the California Education Code, as amended today

Admittance isn't speech. (There might be an argument for assembly. But we already have precedence in e.g. the Civil Rights Acts that it can be regulated.)

>I found myself wondering how in the world they'd actually manage this and not be violating the universities' free speech

One of the primary justifications I keep hearing for Affirmative Action is that legacy admissions are predominantly white, so minorities need an extra edge in non-legacy admissions to balance out the race quotas. If we take this to be true and assume that Affirmative Action is off the table then naturally it's necessary to eliminate legacy admissions.

Of course, you're right that there's no real point in enacting laws if they aren't going to punish institutions who violate them.

There's plenty of laws like that. They're a statement about what someone oughtn't do in the hopes that people follow it simply because it's the law. I think it's a good solution to the situations where we want to establish a norm but it's beyond the scope of government to enforce it.

Assuming laws require enforcement is the secular version of "if you're an atheist and don't fear eternal punishment in hell, why are you good?"

Well, how is legacy admissions free speech and affirmative action “prejudice” and illegal according to the Supreme Court? Neither is based on merit alone.

No I am not arguing for or against affirmative action in college admissions. I am Black and graduated from an HBCU. I haven’t had a reason to think about affirmative action deeply enough to have an informed opinion.

There's still a non-zero cost for compliance because universities have to report their legacy statistics.

If you're talking about research grants, those are awarded based on a extensive, merit-based process, and require them to produce research. These grants have nothing to do with student recruitment. You make it sound like they're receiving government welfare, when what they did was more like winning a competitive contract.

Then: tie that funding to rule changes. If you want government funds, do as we say. Why do things the other way around?

> College admissions is really messed up

I actually think that a national entrance exam (ministered by individual colleges or by a region is okay) is a better way for admission. My fundamental assumption is that the simpler a rule is, the harder it is to game. I understand that many people believe that a holistic admission is more fair to minorities or to economically challenged families, but I'd like to question that belief. Holistic admission is so opaque and complex that families with means will have more advantage over those who don't. Remember the Varsity Blues Scandal? That's just one example. How about getting recommendation letters from a congressman? Which families have a higher chance to get them? And all the consideration about sports? The reality is that sports are expensive. A family who can afford private coaches and frequent travel will have a huge advantage over those who can't. In contrast, everyone can afford a good library to get access to world-class study materials.

BTW, the ivy schools introduced holistic admission to reduce the admission rate of Jewish students back in the 1920s, per Malcom Gladwell. Just because a process is institutionalized does not mean that the process is fare or efficient.

There are functioning reactors at a variety of institutions.

In College Park https://radiation.umd.edu/reactor/

In Cambridge https://nrl.mit.edu/reactor

There is an administrative "deep state" (for lack of a less-loaded word) at all American institutions: government, corporate, non-profit, etc.

Corporations and governments and other institutions first and foremost serve themselves. Changes in laws and leadership are often helpless against an army of creative legal teams, adverse middle-managers, and just general bureaucratic resistance.

A new CEO, a new president, a new law, a new supreme court ruling -- they'll move the needle a lot if the bureaucracy is motivated to change, but will barely move the needle at all if not.

I once worked for a CEO and he would frequently talk about how it was nearly impossible to change his own company. This wasn't even a large company. He just knew that certain ideas would meet bureaucratic resistance and would be slow walked until they died on the vine -- even if the change was the right one.

It's the same reasons why corporate profits go up during inflation despite the actual cost of production staying flat. This was not the case in every sector, but it was in some. Contrary to popular belief. There are bad actors.

While we like to attribute bad actors motivation to purely money, in reality, people jockey for status in many more ways than money. Money is just an obvious measurement of status for which people will compete. In university admissions departments and non-profits, a different set of rules governs status and people who are status seeking in these environments may act out in different ways.

> the only ethnic group that saw a significant decline was Asians

Eyeballing the chart, the decline looks indistinguishable from noise. About all we can conclude is no significant effect.

Prop 16 wouldn't have touched, and Prop 209 doesn't touch, private universities.

This is how the insurance industry has operated for ages. They can't charge higher rates due to race, so they find ways around it: "credit-based insurance score, geographic location, home ownership, and motor vehicle records" [1]

1: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220310005380/en/NEW...

So you just keep cranking on the policy ratchet until you get the outcome you want. Loophole found? Loophole closed. Humans are tricky, and engineering around them is a never ending process. Certainly, the evidence shows that with sufficient incentives and punitive measures available, compliance is possible.

Inconvenient fact for lots of commentators here is that at most Ivy Leagues, the legacy students generally have better scores across most stats than the median admit.

"disparate impact"

This is a known and solved problem for the most part.

> private universities can come with a solution: remove legacy; add a new dimension, let's say X, to evaluate applicants. Hire legacies because they have higher X

You'd have turned a toothless reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy and wilful intent to file false reports.

"Culture fit"

It's like how you can't fire somebody for being black, but you can fire them for wearing an ugly shirt. If you can make decisions for arbitrary reasons, getting around specific prohibitions is just an intelligence test: are you so impressed with yourself, or so stupid, that you have to write down your illegal reasoning somewhere? Did you have to brag about it in an email?

Assuming this is a serious comment, your legacy status would only help your children at that single institution anyway. They might not even want to go to the same school(s) you attended. I don’t see any real reason for concern.

Not going to the same college as your parents is not in the same league as not being able to live in the same country.

Tangentially the US immigration system also has "legacy admissions" (called Immigrant Investor Program)

As does US citizenship

Yeah Americans should be able to bring their parents to the US, they should be able to bring their kids, their SPOUSE ans sponser their siblings.

In addition a rich person should be able to BUY the GREEN CARD OUTRIGHT at a SET price the investor process is so tiring just set the price and sell it without this investor stuff which wastes time because people what to do other things with the money just set a price that goes straight to the IRS and get the green card mailed.

Many, maybe most, would lose massive prestige and possibly fail without all those government grants and the research papers they provide to the school as advertising.

Stanford received $1.82 billion in public funding in 2023 for research alone. The "private" in its name is meaningless. Top private universities in the country receive as much or more government support than state schools.

What if it is just removing state funding from those schools?

Because what the most selective universities sell is not just education, which is usually solid but not necessarily top notch. They are selling the exclusively, the promise that the student will mingle with the right kind of folks. They sell intense networking opportunities with upwardly-mobile folks, and with kids from very well-off families.

BTW this is also why such institutions pay so much attention to.extracurricular activities, clubs, sports, traditions of certain elaborate mischiefs, etc. These all are bonding mechanisms that make the alumni networks more tightly knit and thus more valuable to the alumni.

This is a significant reason why they are glad to accept legacy admissions: it helps keep the links between fresh graduates and influential but older alumni, again making the network more valuable.

The academic load helps keep those with weak intelligence and willpower away. It also provides useful knowledge and a formal degree, but it's sort of secondary, technical detail.

The Los Angeles Lakers quite literally do have legacy admissions. They drafted LeBron James's son even though he's nowhere close to being an NBA-level talent just so that they could keep LeBron happy.

You haven’t thought about this, have you?

Money. Status.

The parents of legacies are… alumni. Alumni are the same people who are the biggest donors, the biggest cheerleaders (spreading the virtues of the university to people they talk to), and might even participate in the university application process. Frequently alumni will identify high talent kids and encourage them to go to their favored school. The joke that “daddy bought the new building on campus so Johnny can attend, despite low grades” is a trope, but it’s not wrong.

Affirmative action was (1) an effort to apply similar representation to the university to the wider population in the country (2) bring more diversified experience+culture+thought to campus and (3) to try and level the playing field after 200+ years of rejecting people based on things that are irrelevant to academic performance.

You seem to think that life is entirely a contest of merit. In practice, large groups of people almost never value merit over wealth, status, exclusivity.

Let's face it - a lot of universities are pretty much professional sports teams, so professional sports team do have those things...

Absolutely agreed. And I think we'll get there, honestly. This particular bit of legislation feels toothless because it's fighting against some of the most powerful, politically-connected people in California. But we'll slowly chip away at that over time. Maybe it'll take another 20 years, but sometimes progress is slow.

The typical non-elite college is not particularly selective about admissions so laws like this are irrelevant.

Plus graduates from elite colleges have a disproportionately large impact on society, so all this extra focus isn't completely misplaced. Should these rules only apply if the admissions percentage drops below some arbitrary cutoff?

Colleges are admitting students, not their whole families, so legacy preferences never made sense except as a easy to gatekeep the upper class. Laws like this do serve the public interest, and I don't see why a college should be exempt just because it isn't famous

We really have no idea. There are lots of legacy admits at universities, but also legacy students are often pretty good candidates on their own. At my alma mater for instance, legacy students typically had better stats than the median admit.

So it's hard to say how much removing legacy preference would change admissions.

But at max, it is only affecting a few tens of thousands students per year.

> Those reports showed that the practice was most widespread at Stanford and U.S.C., where, at both schools, about 14 percent of students who were admitted in the fall of 2022 had legacy or donor connections. At Santa Clara University, Mr. Newsom’s alma mater, 13 percent of admissions had such ties.

It's really about jealousy and populist measures

Well, they can stop taking any public money and do what ever the hell they want. it's a simple quid pro quo. Don't like the deal, don't take the money.

Freedom of association has been a dead letter for decades though.

Turning it around, what's the obvious challenge that will be guaranteed to work in court in your opinion?

What you are missing is they didn't actually ban it. It is a name and shame law.

research grants and preferential tax status I'm assuming are the carrots/sticks here

No need to worry. They can keep the legacy admissions for the badminton club I guess.

>while not violating anyone's freedom

Compelled speech is a bright line violation. There are very few scenarios where it is allowed by American precedent, and a graduate's resume is absolutely not one.

Note that the legacy admission reporting required here is dependent on the universities accepting funding. The government requiring reports in exchange for funding is very different from compelling people at gun point to include information about their university on resumes.

> If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed. But that's the problem today - the wealthy have no shame.

At face value, entitlement was never burdened by the concept of shame.

>If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed.

I don't think the stereotype that the "rich kid" who got in was a C student who's absent parents just paid the right people is accurate. A lot of these wealthy students are more than qualified, the schools themselves don't have enough seats. On paper, they are mostly identical students, credentials-wise, and the legacy got in because Dad donated last semester.

The blame here mostly goes to schools and system. If you are rich kid, you're still a kid and you see the world they way you were taught to see the world.

In some ways it applies to rest of the community as well not just rich people. For example the whole school district thing in US; where you get to go to a better public school if you can afford to live in better neighborhood.

Everything becomes blurry when institutions accept public funding (for research, etc.) as well as accepting tax breaks or exemption status.

I'm of the opinion that we actually require far too little of organizations that accept public money. We should be getting more public-good guarantees to go along with that money. (I'm thinking stuff like: any research done with public funding should have free-to-access results, published under a permissive copyleft-like license.)

Stanford doesn't need your money

If that is truly the only reason why those schools are useful, then maybe making them useless is not a bad thing?

> entire reason you want your smart kid to go to these schools is so they can become friends with the rich kids from a legacy family. By banning the rich kids from them it makes the entire institution useless.

Yeah, kids and parents with this motivation aren't those we want affiliated with our top universities.

If they receive public funds, they can go and suck limes. They do receive public funds.

That being said, since they receive public funds, they should also be subject to the first amendment as strictly as public universities.

Imagine, Columbia ordered to reinstate the Gaza protestors, and Ivy League generally forced to provide as easy access to forums for conservatives as is provided to progressives.