On Monday, September 30, Governor Newsom signed a law banning legacy admissions at private, nonprofit colleges in California—a practice that the University of California schools did away with in 1998. Approximately 14 percent of Stanford’s 2022 entering class had legacy or donor connections. “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” Governor Newsom said in a press release. “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.” Here, Ralph Richard Banks, (BA ’87, MA ’87), the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the co-founder and faculty director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, discusses the new law and why it matters.

Why is legacy admissions an issue?  Do you think it’s a problem?

The problem is that the persistence of legacy admissions, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, leaves schools in the position of offering an admissions preference to students from the most economically advantaged families (most of whom are white) yet being precluded from extending any preference to students from racial minority groups in the interest of diversity.

So, the practice impacts certain groups of students more than others?

Yes, the students who benefit from legacy preferences are, at most schools, more likely to be white and from affluent families than students who are racial minority and/or from middle class or disadvantaged families.

Do you agree with the ban—that it should be a legal ban?

Despite the unfairness of legacy preferences, private universities should be permitted to rely on them, as they are absolutely central to the fund-raising model on which universities rely.

Is this a separate issue from the Varsity Blues scandal of parents buying their children admission to top-tier universities, or are the issues related?

Both Varsity Blues and legacy preferences raise the question of the fairness of the admissions practices at elite universities. Even controlling for levels of academic achievement or test scores, students from wealthy families are dramatically overrepresented in the student bodies of elite universities, and there are myriad ways in which the admissions processes are tilted in favor of the already advantaged.

How might private universities and colleges in California challenge the ban? Or do you think they would try?

I don’t know that universities need to challenge the ban, as there is no basis for actually enforcing it. The law simply provides for a sort of moral shaming of universities, as those in violation of the law will have that fact publicized by the government.

Ralph Richard Banks is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a professor, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is the Founder and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, an initiative that aims to confront and counter the polarization that plagues American society through an analysis of contentious racial issues free from the orthodoxies of Left and Right. He is the co-author of two leading law school casebooks, Racial Justice and the Law: Cases and Materials (2016) (with co-editors Kim Forde-Mazrui, Guy Uriel Charles and Cristina Rodriguez) and Family Law in a Changing America (2^nd ed. 2024) (with co-editors Douglas NeJaime, Joanna Grossman, and Suzanne Kim). He is also the author of the trade book Is Marriage for White People?  How the African American Marriage Decline affects Everyone (2011; paperback 2012), described by the Los Angeles Times as a “must read,” by the New York Times as “important” and by the Wilson Quarterly (the official publication of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) as one of the Top Ten Books of 2011.