Democratic US lawmakers propose banning legacy admissions

(Reuters) – Democratic U.S. lawmakers said on Wednesday they were reintroducing a bill to ban higher education institutions that receive federal funds, as do virtually all U.S. colleges and universities, from favoring applicants with ties to donors and alumni.

The announcement came on the heels of the U.S. Education Department launching a civil rights investigation into Harvard to determine whether the college racially discriminates by favoring such “legacy” applicants in its admissions process.

Legacy admissions at schools such as Harvard University have been shown to overwhelmingly favor white, wealthy students over students of color from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Many U.S. colleges and universities use legacy admissions policies, but they have drawn renewed scrutiny since June, when the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious policies adopted by Harvard and the University of North Carolina to ensure more non-white students were admitted.

The bill announced on Wednesday, the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, was introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley in 2022, but did not make it beyond a Senate committee.

Merkley urged lawmakers to reconsider the legislation at a press conference alongside two other Democrats: Representative Jamaal Bowman and Senator Chris Van Hollen.

“We have discrimination against children more qualified from challenged backgrounds, and in favor of less-qualified, from affluent backgrounds,” Merkley said, noting that he was the first in his family to attend college.

“What kind of a sense of opportunity is that?”

Viet Nguyen, executive director of EdMobilizer, a non-profit that has been campaigning against legacy admissions since 2018, joined the lawmakers at Wednesday’s press conference.

Nguyen, a first-generation college student who graduated from Brown and received degrees from Stanford and Harvard, said college application questions about legacy status had “signaled” to him that he did not belong in higher education.

EdMobilizer is pushing alumni of 30 top colleges and universities to withhold donations from their schools until they end legacy admissions.

Wesleyan University and the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus announced they would stop using legacy admissions in July, following a handful of other U.S. higher education institutions that have ended them in recent years.

(Reporting by Julia Harte; Editing by Donna Bryson and Alistair Bell)