Admissions Tea: California Banned Legacy Admissions. Stanford and USC Kept Them Anyway.
California’s new legacy-admissions law was supposed to stop private universities that receive state-funded student aid from favoring applicants with alumni or donor connections. Instead, Stanford and the University of Southern California found two different ways to preserve the practice.
Stanford gave up millions of dollars in state funding so that the law would no longer apply to it. USC continued accepting state aid, acknowledged that it was violating the law, and accepted the resulting public scrutiny. Different strategies, same outcome: legacy preference remains part of the admissions process at both universities.
What Did California’s Legacy-Admissions Law Actually Ban?
California enacted Assembly Bill 1780 in 2024, and its prohibition took effect on September 1, 2025. The law does not prohibit universities from admitting the children of alumni. Instead, it prohibits covered private nonprofit universities from considering an applicant’s relationship to an alumnus or donor as a factor in regular or early admissions.
However, the definition of a “covered” institution created an important limitation. The law applies only to private universities that receive or benefit from state-funded student financial assistance, or enroll students who receive it.
In practice, private universities faced three choices:
Keep legacy and donor preferences.
Continue participating in California student-aid programs.
Stay off the state’s public list of institutions violating the law.
They could choose only two.
The original legislation contained stronger financial consequences, but those were removed before passage. Under the final law, institutions that remain covered and violate the prohibition must submit additional admissions data and be publicly identified by the California Department of Justice. There is no fine, which gave Stanford and USC considerable room to maneuver.
Stanford Chose Legacy Preference Over State Funding
Stanford decided to keep considering alumni and donor connections, withdraw from California financial-aid programs, and avoid being classified as noncompliant.
In July 2025, Stanford announced that it would opt out of state-funded financial aid, including the Cal Grant program. Because Stanford no longer enrolls students receiving that assistance, it falls outside the law’s definition of a covered institution.
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanford is giving up approximately $3 million annually in state aid. The university has said it will replace that money with its own scholarship funding and automatically adjust affected students’ financial-aid packages. Students should therefore receive the same amount of assistance without needing to take additional action.
Stanford is, at least technically, complying with the law. It has simply made itself exempt. The university has also been unusually direct about its policy. Stanford says that it currently considers alumni and donor status for “academically qualified” applicants while it continues to review the practice.
In fall 2023, 295 students with alumni or donor connections were admitted to Stanford, representing 13.6% of the admitted undergraduate class. Among students who ultimately enrolled, 15.4% had one of those connections.
USC Chose State Funding Over Compliance
USC made a different calculation. It decided to keep considering alumni and donor connections, keep participating in the Cal Grant program, and accept being publicly identified as noncompliant.
Because the final law imposes no financial penalty, USC does not have to choose between Cal Grant funding and legacy preferences. Its primary consequence is reputational: additional disclosure requirements and eventual placement on California’s public list of institutions violating the law.
For fall 2023, USC reported that 1,791 admitted students had relationships to university alumni or donors. That represented approximately 14.5% of all admitted students—again, roughly one in seven.
USC has said that these students were academically competitive and that no alumni or donor relationship guarantees admission. But “not guaranteed” is an extremely low bar. Almost nothing guarantees admission to a highly selective university. But a preference doesn’t need to rescue an unqualified student to have an impact on admissions; even helping one qualified applicant emerge from a pool containing thousands of other qualified applicants is incredibly meaningful when the competition is this close.
“Academically Qualified” Does Not Mean the Preference Had No Effect
Both Stanford and USC emphasize that connected students still meet their academic standards. Stanford’s 2023 report, for example, states that none of its admitted legacy- or donor-connected students failed to meet the university’s admissions standards.
Let’s add some context to this, though.
At a university admitting only a small fraction of its applicants, meeting the academic standard is only the beginning. Stanford rejects thousands of students each year who have outstanding grades, rigorous coursework, and exceptional test scores. The relevant question is whether their connections helped them receive an offer over similarly qualified applicants without those connections. The existing reports cannot answer that question.
Similarly, the fact that approximately one in seven admitted students had alumni or donor connections does not mean that one in seven was admitted solely because of those connections. It tells us that the connection appeared in the student’s file and could be considered. It does not reveal how much weight it carried in each decision.
Families should neither assume that every connected student was unqualified nor pretend that the preference was meaningless simply because the students met the university’s standards.
Why Are Universities Fighting So Hard to Preserve Legacy Preference?
At first, Stanford and USC seem to have made opposite decisions. Stanford protected its public compliance status and sacrificed state funding. USC protected its state funding and absorbed the negative publicity. But both institutions protected their ability to consider alumni and donor connections. Why?
Universities may believe legacy preference helps them:
Strengthen relationships with alumni families.
Build multigenerational university communities.
Enroll students who already feel connected to the institution.
Encourage alumni engagement and future donations.
Continue selecting from a pool that disproportionately includes affluent applicants.
Legacy preference can produce a meaningful admissions advantage. A major Opportunity Insights study of Ivy-Plus admissions found that legacy preference accounted for a substantial portion of the admissions advantage enjoyed by applicants from the wealthiest families. In the researchers’ data, legacy applicants from top-one-percent families were five times as likely to be admitted as the average applicant with similar test scores, demographic characteristics, and admissions-office ratings.
Those results are not Stanford-specific, and they come from earlier admissions cycles. However, they demonstrate why describing legacy status as merely a sentimental or ceremonial consideration can be misleading.
Do Legacy Preferences Actually Increase Alumni Donations?
The evidence is much less conclusive than these universities’ continued commitment to the policy might suggest. One empirical study of the top 100 universities found no statistically significant evidence that legacy-preference policies caused higher alumni giving after researchers controlled for factors including alumni wealth. The study also found no evidence of a decline in donations at institutions that eliminated legacy preference.
Before accounting for wealth, institutions with legacy preferences did appear to receive more alumni donations. The researchers concluded that the difference may have reflected the wealth of their alumni populations rather than the legacy policy itself.
That does not necessarily prove that universities receive no financial benefit. Some potential returns (major gifts, bequests, or loyalty spanning several generations) could take decades to appear and may be difficult to capture in a study. Still, the evidence does not establish the simple equation that legacy preferences lead to more alumni donations, as these universities sometimes imply.
Stanford and USC may be acting on institutional experience, assumptions about alumni behavior, or potential returns that cannot easily be measured. Their decisions reveal how valuable they believe the practice is, not whether that belief has been conclusively proven.
What Does This Mean for Stanford and USC Applicants?
Legacy preference remains in play at both universities.
For the 2026–27 application cycle, applicants should not assume that California’s ban removed alumni and donor connections from consideration. Stanford has publicly confirmed that it continues to consider those factors for academically qualified applicants, and USC has retained its practice despite the law.
Legacy status is still not a substitute for a competitive application.
Stanford and USC receive far more academically qualified applications than they can accept. A family connection may provide an advantage, but neither university describes it as overcoming an otherwise uncompetitive application. Legacy applicants still need the academic preparation, activities, recommendations, and essays expected of the wider applicant pool.
Non-legacy applicants are not facing a new disadvantage.
The law did not make admission more difficult than it was previously. It simply failed to remove an existing institutional preference. Students without alumni connections should still apply if the university is a strong fit, but they should understand that holistic admissions does not mean every applicant enters the process with identical advantages. A balanced college list remains particularly important when applying to institutions as selective as Stanford and USC.
Stanford applicants should not expect to lose need-based aid because of the change.
Stanford has said it will replace affected state grants with university scholarship funding. Students should still complete every required financial-aid form and compare their final award carefully, but the university says families do not need to take any special action because of its withdrawal from the Cal Grant program.
USC will continue accepting Cal Grants.
Future reports may reveal more about the size of the preference.
Under AB 1780, a university reporting a violation must disclose the admission rate of applicants receiving legacy or donor preference compared with the rate for applicants who did not receive it. USC’s reports may therefore provide information that previous disclosures did not: not merely how many connected students were admitted, but how their admission rate compares with everyone else’s.
That will give applicants a more useful measure of the preference’s possible impact.
Final Thoughts
California attempted to use two forms of pressure: public money and public embarrassment. Stanford could afford to replace the public money. USC decided it could withstand the public embarrassment. As a result, the law has not meaningfully changed admissions at two of the institutions where legacy status may matter most to high-achieving applicants. Stanford absorbed the financial cost, and USC absorbed the bad press—but neither gave up legacy preference.
For students, the lesson is broader than these two universities. A college’s stated admissions policy tells us what factors it may consider. It does not tell us how much each factor matters, how consistently it is applied, or how strongly the institution will fight to preserve it. In this case, Stanford and USC’s decisions may tell us more about the value they place on legacy admissions than their official explanations ever could.
