Call it a ban on affirmative action for the well-connected: California’s Legislature on Wednesday passed a bill barring the state’s private nonprofit colleges from making admissions decisions based on whether family members of students donated money to the school or had attended the school themselves.
If Gov. Gavin Newsom signs it, the state would join four others that also made legacy preferences in admissions illegal for either public or private institutions. With California’s outsized national role — it’s the most populous state and enrolls the most college students — bill backers say this legislation will serve as a necessary corrective to last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned all but military colleges from using race as a factor in admissions.
Assemblymember Philip Ting, a Democrat from San Francisco, wrote Assembly Bill 1780 to ban legacy admissions in part as a response to that Supreme Court ruling.
