How the End of Legacy Admissions Disadvantages Black Students

The landscape of college admissions is currently undergoing seismic shifts in ways we haven’t seen since the widespread adoption of affirmative-action policies in the 1970s. In 2023, the Supreme Court overturned these decades-long policies, ruling that it is illegal to consider race in college-admissions decisions. In the wake of the court’s decision, we are seeing declining numbers of Black student enrollment at many selective colleges, along with changes in the percentages of Asian student enrollment on some campuses.

One of the most recent changes came in the form of a ban on legacy admissions signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California, in September 2024. California has had such bans in place for public universities since 1998; the new legislation, which will affect private universities such as the University of Southern California, Santa Clara University, and Stanford University, will take effect in September 2025. “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” a statement from Newsom’s office read. “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”

As Newsom’s rhetoric suggests, these fundamental changes to the way college admissions operate in the United States are being implemented in the name of fairness, as ways to uphold “merit” and further the American Dream. However, the emphasis on merit as a marker of fairness ignores history and overlooks how merit is shaped by systemic inequalities. This shifting standard moves the goal posts for upwardly mobile Black families, denying them the same legacy-admissions pathway to the American Dream that white families have benefited from for generations.

As a Black alumnus of Stanford, a scholar of educational inequality, and, most recently, a parent of Black children, I have both a personal and scholarly interest in this ruling. This ban, and those that will surely follow, threatens educational justice by ignoring extant sociological conditions and leans into false conceptions of merit as a fair principle for college admissions.

It’s no secret that many highly selective, prestigious colleges did not admit sizable cohorts of Black students until the ’70s and ’80s. Many of those students, now parents and grandparents, fought ardently to make their alma maters places that would be safe for generations of Black students after them. In the case of Stanford, I will never forget attending a Black Alumni Summit in 2017 and learning of the horrors faced by Black alumni who attended in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But rather than disinvest in the university, the alumni on that panel dedicated their labor to improving the institution. They helped to make it the one that I attended, and loved: a university with a thriving Black student life integrated into the broader campus community.

The children and grandchildren of those pioneering Black students, and the alumni for whom they opened doors, are now positioned to benefit from legacy admissions. However, policymakers have suddenly decided we need to revise our approach in favor of merit-based admissions to colleges. Much like the unmet promises of the GI Bill — which excluded many Black veterans from homeownership — and the setbacks of school desegregation due to white flight, Newsom’s ban once again closes off pathways that could help Black families achieve upward mobility. It seems that as soon as there are critical masses of Black alumni whose families stand to benefit from legacy admissions, the practice is banned. Once again, the goal posts are being moved.

Banning legacy admissions in the name of fairness ignores how this approach fails to correct a legacy of racial injustice. During my time as an undergraduate at Stanford, it was not uncommon to encounter white peers with grandparents who attended the “Harvard of the West” at a time when my grandparents and many other Black Americans were migrating North and West in search of basic civil rights. The advantage conferred on my peers and those like them through legacy admissions begets a generational compounding of advantage. The degrees earned, businesses built, connections forged, and wealth amassed by white families as a result of legacy admissions have resulted in durable, cumulative privilege. This accumulation of advantage does not halt because of a change in admissions practices.

Well-resourced, selective universities like Stanford are often some of the most effective mobility-boosting institutions for marginalized students. By attending such institutions, Black students in particular have the potential to change not only the trajectory of their own lives but also that of their offspring. Yet, despite these mobility boosts, socioeconomic privilege does not always materialize across generations in Black families: Only 18 percent of Black children born into the top fifth remain there as adults, compared to 41 percent of white children, and 51 percent of Black children born into the middle class fall out of it, compared to just 23 percent of white children. The same connections forged and degrees garnered do not always equate to the same socioeconomic status, let alone wealth, in Black families as they do in white ones. As such, legacy admissions for Black families specifically do not represent an opportunity to further unjust advantages but to help stabilize the gains of a community for whom formal access to predominantly white institutions of higher education is still relatively novel.

I am not arguing that the process of legacy admissions as it stands is just or fair. Nor am I suggesting that all Black students and families necessarily stand to benefit from legacy admissions. The fact is that, for generations, legacy admissions as a form of preferential admission have worked to further exclude the Black community from institutions of higher education. However, I do aim to identify California’s ban as a part of a larger pattern of policy changes put in place in the name of fairness that alter mobility avenues for Black students in the present and for generations to come. Rather than serving as an overdue correction of an unjust policy, the legacy ban comes too late to undo the generational benefits secured by privileged groups, while ensuring that marginalized families will never have the chance to reap similar advantages that could lead to generational mobility. Newsom and other policymakers seeking equity must recognize that what seems fair often perpetuates the exclusion of Black families from pathways to mobility.