Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a new statewide ban on legacy admissions. It bars all colleges and universities, public or private, from taking into consideration an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors after the ban takes effect in September 2025. In a signing statement, Newsom said, “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work.”

California, the nation’s largest state, is now the fifth state to ban legacy admissions and the second state to adopt a ban that applies to private colleges. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-conscious admissions, this action may have given crucial momentum to the push for merit-based admissions. (It’s worth noting that the University of California system had already banned legacy admissions since 1998.)

There’s a lot to like about what California just did. Research by Harvard University’s Raj Chetty has found that a legacy applicant is four times more likely to be admitted to mom or dad’s alma mater than a non-legacy applicant with comparable test scores. The idea that a student should get a leg up because of where his or her parents went to school runs counter to basic American notions of fairness and earned opportunity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, ending legacy preferences is one place where left and right can find common ground. It’s an opportunity to ensure that colleges are giving everyone a fair shake—rather than putting a thumb on the scale for the fortunate and connected. Indeed, a 2022 Pew Research poll found that 75% of Americans oppose legacy preferences.

So, why is this troubling policy still a part of the higher education firmament? Well, as the Progressive Policy Institute’s Rick Kahlenberg and I observed last year, it’s a classic case of interest group politics. “An ardent minority of college officials and alumni groups love them,” we wrote, “the former because it gives them an important carrot they can wave at alumni and the latter for the advantages they confer on their kids.” And that’s been enough to help the higher education lobby long stymie calls for reform.

Now, there have been a smattering of arguments mounted in defense of legacy admissions. Some argue that family attachments can lead accomplished students to attend schools they might not otherwise consider. Others argue that first-generation college-goers benefit from attending school with legacies because they’re exposed to peers with connections and more familiarity with elite culture. These arguments join more familiar claims that catering to legacies helps bring in dollars that keep costs down or helps to maintain a strong campus culture.

No matter how carefully couched, though, such claims accept the principle that it’s just fine for selective colleges to explicitly favor connections and money at the expense of merit. That sentiment only grows more troubling when one appreciates how campuses assiduously track and cater to wealthy alumni in order to pad campus coffers.

So, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of offering two cheers for Gov. Newsom and California’s legislature. Why two cheers and not three?

Two reasons.

First, I’m concerned they did this in a way that erodes the First Amendment’s right to free association. When they’re operating on their own dime, private colleges have a right to admit whom they like. At the same time, lawmakers have every right to write rules for public colleges —and to bar any college, public or private, from accessing state-provided grants, aid, or loans if it selects students based on a secretive, self-serving process. To protect both free association rights and fairness, therefore, states should make the elimination of legacy preferences a precondition for public aid rather than a mandatory decree. That’s not what California did here.

Second, there are issues with enforcement. California colleges that violate the law are instructed to report some data points to the state, such as the admission rates for legacy and non-legacy applicants. That’s helpful, but as with race-conscious admissions, it’s unclear who will ensure that colleges are honoring the law. Part of the problem is that selective colleges (both public and private) treat admissions as a black box. This means it’s not obviously clear how colleges decide whom to admit or whether they’re abiding by legal strictures. For that reason, it’s important to make the admissions process more transparent and require a third-party audit at a specified interval.

Kudos to Golden State officials for getting this directionally right. But when it comes to policy, it’s always the details that matter. Here’s hoping that other states move to emulate California and then proceed in a more deliberate fashion.