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For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Stanford University will require applicants to submit standardized test scores in its fall 2026 admissions process. It will also continue legacy admissions despite a new state law, effective Sept. 1, 2025, that will cut state financial aid to students whose colleges continue the practice.
University officials are studying whether they should consider connections to alumni or donors as part of admission to first-year and transfer students, but those like Ellie Eckerson Peters, senior director of research and policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit that promotes access to college to all students, say the message Stanford is sending is clear.
“(It) really sends a signal to students and their families about who belongs at the institution and whose access they’re prioritizing,” she said. “Stanford is making an active decision to preserve an inequitable practice rather than expanding opportunity.”
Stanford students will no longer be able to access the Cal Grant program. The university said it will substitute scholarships for that funding. The university says it will automatically adjust financial aid packages for students.
There are “important issues on which there are many perspectives” on legacy admissions, a university spokesperson told The Stanford Daily, which broke the news. For example, institutions may believe they can’t get rid of legacy preferences because it would hurt its alumni donations. However, a 2010 review of the top 100 universities in U.S. News & World Report showed that prioritizing legacy students didn’t have a statistically significant impact on alumni giving.
More than half of the colleges and universities that once gave an admissions preference to the relatives of alumni have stopped doing so in the past decade, according to a February report from nonprofit think tank Education Reform Now.
Schools like Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Amherst College in Massachusetts, where legacy students used to represent about 11% of each class, have done away with legacy preference in admissions in the last decade.
“Now is the time to end this historic program that inadvertently limits educational opportunity by granting a preference to those whose parents are graduates of the College,” Biddy Martin, Amherst’s president at the time, said in a prepared statement.
One undergraduate Stanford student, Teddy Ganea, defended legacy admissions in an October 2024 article for The Stanford Review, a student-run newspaper founded in 1987 by Peter Thiel and Norman Book.
“Legacy is a key engine of American meritocracy,” he wrote. “For it furnishes the financial and social resources that integrate meritorious non-elites into the elite. Therefore, outlawing the practice is a monumental blunder, one that moves America towards a more unmeritocratic elite, a more unfair system, and a more dysfunctional society.”
The university says it is making other efforts to expand access to a Stanford education to more students, such as increasing the size of this fall’s entering class by about 150 students. It also says that in recent years, about 20% of the members of each first-year class at the school have been first-generation college students.
According to past reporting from this news organization, in 2019, 16.2% of Stanford University’s accepted applicants were children whose parents attended Stanford, while 1.5% of all accepted applicants had donated to the university. In 2023, just 13.6% of accepted applicants had family or philanthropic ties to the university. This news organization has asked Stanford for figures from 2024 and 2025 admissions. At the time of publication, the university hadn’t responded.
Mandatory test scores return
Meanwhile, a faculty committee voted to reinstate mandatory SAT or ACT testing, noting that “academic excellence is the primary criterion for admission to Stanford.”
“Stanford considers each component of an application in context as part of an integrated and comprehensive whole,” according to a July 29 statement from the university.
Stanford first waived SAT or ACT scores for first-year and transfer applicants in February 2021, so students would not “jeopardize their health or well-being to take future sittings of non-required tests,” according to a university announcement at the time.
Undergraduate students entering Stanford during the 2024-25 school year averaged a 3.94 high school GPA and a 1540 SAT score, for those who submitted scores, according to Stanford.
Useless the something changed legacy admissions, also known as legacy preferences or alumni connections, refers to a boost in a prospective student’s odds of admission to a college just because the applicant is related to an alumnus, usually a parent or grandparent.
“Being a legacy is kind of like getting the Disney FastPass to go to the front of the line,” says Julie Park, an associate professor of education at the University of Maryland, College Park. “It’s not that you didn’t pay to get in like everyone else, and you probably have pretty decent credentials. But being a legacy is something that gives you an extra boost.”
So based on the article “Legacy is a key engine of American meritocracy” meaning if your rich parent or grandparent is a Stanford alumni that give money to Stanford which is intergenerational meritocracy that is ok…What spin Stanford put on legacy admissions.
The Teddy Ganea / Peter Thiel (Stanford Review) “Defense of Legacy Admissions” boils down to two things, neither of which have anything to do with meritocracy, even though that’s what is claimed.
* Mo’ money for the university, so they can offer lower tuition and more scholarships (debatable)
* A spurious claim that somehow “legacy elite” are the only elite admitted to elite universities ? Still puzzling over the crux of this claim:
“After all, eliminating legacy admissions certainly won’t dismantle the influence of entrenched elites. What it does do, however, is push elites out of top higher education. In the six years after Johns Hopkins eliminated legacy preference, for example, the proportion of legacy admits was quartered, falling from 12.5% to 3.5%.
And a diminishing legacy presence on campus harms the bootstrapping Americans it’s supposed to help. Because while a few more spots might open up for meritorious non-elites, all admits will be starved of the resources and connections needed to succeed.”