Students in Virginia will no longer get a thumb on the scale when they apply to the public universities their parents attended, after Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed bills banning legacy preferences in admissions Friday.
“There really wasn’t any pushback,” said Sen. Schuyler T. VanValkenburg (D-Henrico), who sponsored the Senate bill. “I think colleges know that these practices are indefensible.” Legacy preferences strike people of all political persuasions as unfair, he said, a barrier to both merit-based admissions and diversity of the incoming class.
While many of the state’s public colleges don’t give such a preference — Virginia Tech announced last year that it would stop — the decision will be felt at two nationally known, highly selective schools, the University of Virginia and William & Mary.
“For my family and so many others, college has been a critical pathway to the middle class,” said Rep. Dan Helmer (D-Fairfax), who sponsored the bill with identical language in the House. “And I and Senator VanValkenburg both deeply believe that path should be open to as many students as possible, based on what they’ve accomplished and who they are, and not who their parents are.”
The law is one of many efforts nationally to eliminate legacy preferences in admissions.
The practice is a long-standing one at many schools, and proponents have said it tightens bonds with alumni, creating multigenerational ties to an institution, and helps schools better predict which admitted students will choose to attend. But the Supreme Court’s rejection of race-based affirmative action last year forced a reckoning of legacy preferences, which critics have long said are all too apt to help White wealthy students the most. President Biden singled it out as one of the practices “that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”
Multiple other state legislatures, including Massachusetts, New York and Maryland, are considering legislation. Colorado passed a state law in 2021 banning the practice at public universities.
And there’s a bill in Congress with bipartisan sponsors, Sens. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), that would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to require institutions to adopt admissions practices that don’t give preferential treatment to children of alumni or donors.
Kaine said the issue felt particularly important after the Supreme Court ruling. “There have long been affirmative action policies for the wealthy and privileged,” he said, such as legacy preferences. The ruling threw into relief a sort of cognitive dissonance, he said: “‘Okay, we’re not going to allow you to do affirmative action programs for those who have traditionally been shut out. But you can have affirmative action for those who have traditionally had a leg up.’ It just seems gross.”
He said he was pleased the Virginia General Assembly had taken up the issue with such overwhelming support. On Saturday, Kaine and Young issued a joint statement welcoming the news. “Now let’s build off this success and get our bill passed to end legacy and donor admissions preferences nationwide,” they said. “This will promote upward mobility and fairness in the admissions process.”
A spokesman for U-Va. didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
U-Va. clarified its policies about legacy preferences last summer, saying information about their parents’ attendance would not be given to admissions officers in a “checkbox” manner but that applicants could write an essay about a personal or historical connection to the school and how that prepared them to contribute to U-Va.
Suzanne Clavet, a spokeswoman for William & Mary, said the university is reviewing the final legislation to ensure their policies align with it. “As we have said in the past, we do not anticipate this legislation having a significant impact on our process,” she wrote in an email. “William & Mary does not currently have a separate admission process or standard for legacy applicants, and our data confirms that the academic profile of admitted legacy applicants is very high and consistent with our overall admitted class.”
William & Mary has found that legacy students who are admitted are more than twice as likely to enroll, according to a report given to the school’s Board of Visitors last fall. The report also said the college was evaluating several strategies for increasing socioeconomic diversity among students.
After the legacy bills were passed, VanValkenburg, the state lawmaker, said, “I think we’re going to see this happen across the country. And I think that’s good for our colleges and for our communities.”
