California bans legacy admissions at private universities

This legislation is good in terms of liberal values, and makes us feel equitable, but its effect might be minor/statistically invisible.

I used to be neighbors with an admission officer of a pretty elite university. I asked her about this once, and from what I remember she said it wouldn't affect their classes much. She said there was a huge sampling bias in the data.

• Legacy applicants were likely to be familiar with their parents' alma maters from a younger age, more likely to share values/personalities with the university, more likely to apply to begin with.
• Legacy students More likely to visit/demonstrate interest (they're more likely to live closer, people often settle down near their alma mater), and way more likely to apply Early-Decision.
• Legacies are by definition not fist-generation college students, so they have more support/knowledge about how to apply and get in places than first-generation students.

In the US "holistic" admissions process, that personality/"fit" stuff is considered almost as important as academic merit. The "legacy" checkbox is a quantitative representation of that qualitative info about personality. She said Early-Decision was the most important to determine yield because it's a binding commitment to attend, which is stable for the institution. After that, she said that they could relatively consistently control who attended based on who they gave financial aid to.

I asked her when legacy made the difference and she said maybe if the parents were large donors (several million dollars), the finance department would tell them they had to admit the student they would otherwise reject, but that wasn't common. She said there were different "tiers" of legacies/donor applications and that 95% of them were ignored. She could think of only a handful of instances this year out of thousands of applications where it was a truly unqualified student admitted for legacy/donation reasons. She said most of the time if legacy came up in admission, it was to determine if an already-qualified applicant was likely to attend or not, to calculate yield.

She seemed to think that banning the practice of legacy admissions was okay but that her university would probably just take more people in Early-Decision to make up for it, since that was where many/most legacies are applying anyway, so the class makeup would be almost identical. She said her department mainly cared about class diversity and good yield and that the finance department cared about consistent donations. Either way, their motivations were primarily related to stability/cashflow for the institution, not fairness in society.

In addition to making it harder to admit based on legacy, it makes sense to also focus on equity earlier in the educational system. Universal pre-K, more equitable school funding (maybe still based on property taxes, but not so locally), free school lunches, better school transportation (like public transit passes for all students), and other resources to even out the playing field earlier on. Also more funding to do things like host "admission fairs" with universities so that the students have exposure to higher education processes even if they live in the inner city.