Legacy Admission Ban Passes In Maryland, Falters In Connecticut

Legislation that would ban colleges from giving an advantage to the relatives of alumni has met very different fates in two states recently.

Last month Maryland enacted a legacy admission ban that applies to both public and private colleges. But in Connecticut, the House converted an earlier bill with a similar prohibition into one that would require colleges only to report data about their use of legacy admissions.

Maryland now becomes the third state to eliminate the practice of legacy preferences, following Colorado which passed its ban in 2021 and Virginia, which did so earlier this year.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed HB 4 into law on April 25. It applies to colleges and universities that receive state funds, regardless of whether they are public or private. In addition to prohibiting any admission preference for relatives of an alum, the law, which goes into effect July 1, also bans institutions from giving a similar preference to applicants who are relatives of a donor to the institution.

In Connecticut, a bill that began as a ban against legacy admission preferences was weakened after private institutions such as Yale University and Fairfield University mounted a campaign defending the practice, arguing that the government should not intrude on how colleges and universities establish and apply their admissions standards.

Bowing to those concerns, the Connecticut Senate passed an amended bill this week that mandates colleges either to indicate they don’t consider legacy status in admissions or report various admission/enrollment data, including the percentage of legacy students admitted along with data comparing the academic credentials of legacy admits to those of other students. The bill now moves to the Connecticut House of Representatives for its consideration.

The fairness of legacy preferences has been challenged for years, resulting in several prominent colleges electing to discontinue them. However, the heat has been turned up against the practice ever since last year’s Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina finding race-conscious admissions to be unconstitutional.

That ruling brought renewed scrutiny to the racial implications of legacy advantages extended to applicants by highly selective institutions. For example, the percentage of the freshmen class admitted at several selective colleges via the legacy route exceeds the percentage of entering freshmen who are Black, according to a recent report, prepared by Education Reform Now. At many of these colleges, three-quarters or more of the legacy applicants receiving acceptances are white.

Results like those prompt an obvious question: If colleges are required to practice race-neutral admissions policies, why should they be able to continue admission practices – like legacy preferences – that appear to discriminate against nonwhite students?

Legacy abolitionists will see these latest two legislative developments as one step forward and one step back.

Maryland’s passage of its new law might give some momentum to other states like Minnesota and Massachusetts that are still considering bans. But the outcome in Connecticut is clearly a setback. It represents a compromise that prevents any real change to the status quo, and it may become a strategy adopted in the future by legacy-preferring colleges to weaken or derail statutory bans in other states.