Gov. Newsom Bans Legacy Admissions, Pretending to Care About Merit

California Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature have now banned “legacy” admissions to colleges. Hilariously, he asserts that college admissions should be based on merit.  This is rich considering he has made “diversity, equity, and inclusion” the governing principle in the state for college admissions and hiring.

“In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” Newsom said in banning consideration of an applicant’s parents’ alma mater status or financial contributions. If I did not know better, I would applaud Newsom for the action and statement. School admissions, and hiring, should be based primarily, if not exclusively, on merit. A meritocracy is what made America great. Meritocracy is no less than the American Dream itself, i.e. no matter where you come from you will be judged based upon your individual merit, thus allowing anyone to succeed (unlike in British society at the time of our founding where ancestry was most important).  

But the truth is Newsom is only banning legacy admissions because he perceives that his ban will benefit “underrepresented groups” like blacks and Latinos. We know this because he has left in place a similar policy which benefits blacks and Latinos.  The state universities give preferences to students whose parents did not go to college. In other words, if the policy benefits minorities, Newsom’s concern about merit goes out the window.   

State universities also give advantages to applicants from low-income households, another policy that has nothing to do with merit and benefits blacks and Hispanics. They also use parental income as the basis, in part, to dump the SAT test.  They maintain that the test benefits children from wealthier families who can afford SAT prep courses.  

This allows them to throw out the only objective measure of scholarly merit and rely exclusively on high school grade point averages.  They then treat all high schools the same, whether it be the best private high school or the worst public school. We know that finishing in the top ten percent of your school is much easier to do at a public school than a private one, but that does not matter in California. This provides the back door affirmative action the leaders seek. 

These policies combine to provide a nice substitute for the old practice of affirmative action whereby decisions were expressly based upon race.  The policies were in place even before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in admissions last year because California has long banned affirmative action in admissions due to residents twice voting to ban it.  

But the will of the people does not get in the way of leftist politicians. They simply went back to good old fashioned class warfare, using parental wealth as a substitute for race. This makes sense since, truth be told, they really had been using race as a substitute for wealth.  

The legality of this newer practice is questionable. If a court determines that the intent of the policy is to discriminate based upon race, then it will apply a “strict scrutiny” test to the policy and likely strike it down. This is the standard the Supreme Court used in striking down affirmative action in the Harvard case. But if they can convince courts their intent is solely to discriminate based on wealth, then the practice likely will not be subject to strict scrutiny and be upheld.

Discriminating based on wealth rather than race works better for the left in California since both the state and the universities are already extremely diverse. Below are the numbers based on ethnicity for this year’s incoming class for the University of California campuses compared to their total numbers in the state:

Latino: 39 percent of students, 40 percent of population

Asian:  33 percent of students, 15 percent of population

White: 18 percent of students, 34 percent of population

Black: 6 percent of students, 6 percent of population

Clearly, “diversity” is not a problem. It is well documented that Asians outperform non-Asians, so their inordinate percentage makes sense. But why are Black and Latino students represented equally compared to their total share of the population, but whites are 50 percent below their share?  I do not think whites are half as qualified as blacks and Latinos.  Clearly the admissions policy of discriminating against high school students whose parents went to college and/or are not from low-income households has made it very difficult for whites to get admitted.

The goal of virtually all parents is to provide a better life for their children. This is what has helped keep the quality of human life improving through the generations.  But these leftist policies run counter to this objective. Parents are penalized for going to college, for career success, and for saving up to put their kids in the best possible schools.   

Put simply, California’s leftist politicians oppose parents passing along a better life to their children because it runs counter to their plan, as Kamala Harris put it, to ensure that “everyone ends up in the same place.”