USC will continue considering legacy status when admitting students, Interim President Beong-Soo Kim said Monday, breaking a new California law that went into effect Sept. 1 that prohibits the consideration at private universities. Kim’s decision will come into effect in next year’s admissions cycle.
Legacy admits made up roughly 14.5% of the 9,374-person fall 2025 first-year admissions class, which was not subject to Assembly Bill 1780. The bill, signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom last September and effective as of Sept. 1, of this year, bans private, nonprofit institutions from providing legacy or donor preference in admissions. Newsom stated in a news release that the law aims to ensure all Californians have the opportunity to “get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work.”
While legacy status is not a criterion for admission to USC, it will remain a consideration in the admission process. USC will have to report legacy and donor admission rates compared to standard rates, as well as “specified information about newly enrolled students,” according to the law. Financial penalties for continuing to consider legacy status in admissions were removed during the legislative process, but USC’s name will be added to a database of violators maintained by the Department of Justice.
“It seemed perverse to us that, in considering two equally qualified applicants, that we couldn’t consider that one of them had a relative who had attended USC and really wanted to come here as their first choice,” Kim said in a briefing with campus media Monday.
Kim said the law didn’t narrowly define the term “relative,” referring to the family of an applicant, making it difficult for the university to implement the law. He also said the university will continue utilizing its “holistic review” process for evaluating applicants.
“In order to get into USC, you absolutely have to be extremely well-qualified. That does not change at all with the decision we’ve made,” Kim said. “We consider that one piece of information as just a very small piece of an applicant’s overall context, experience, interests and fit with USC.”
The law, which was proposed by state assemblymember Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), was created in an effort to make the college application process “more fair and equitable” and align with the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling to limit race-based consideration in admissions, Ting said in the release.
“The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few,” Newsom wrote, “which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”
When asked whether considering legacy status disadvantaged first-generation students, Kim said focusing on one group was “not mutually exclusive at all” to considering the other. Twenty-one percent of the fall 2025 class is made up of first-generation students compared to 22% the year before.
Roughly 2.4% of first-year admits — 90 students — came from the STARS College Network program, which gives opportunities for individuals from rural areas and small towns to attend prestigious universities. That is a 30% increase from the 2024 class.
“We’re still so committed to finding students, regardless of whether they have any family connection or relationship to USC,” Kim said. “The decision was not about trying to suggest, ‘Oh, simply because you have a relative who attended USC, you get in.’ That’s not the case at all. We simply want to be able to continue evaluating individuals’ entire background.”
While the Trump administration has revoked thousands of student visas and made the process more difficult for international students to come study in the U.S., Kim also said the fall 2025 class did not experience “any significant drop” in international student enrollment, though it did decrease compared to fall 2024.
“The overall picture was very positive for USC,” Kim said of international student enrollment. “We did experience a little bit of a drop off compared to last year, but it was not nearly as significant as what people have been thinking from reading the headlines.”
Kim said the university has “no plans to get rid of merit scholarships in any way,” but is still deciding how to allocate funds for next year.
The university saw its highest all-time number of first-year applicants in the fall 2025 admissions cycle with 83,488. Roughly 11.2% of first-year applicants were admitted, which is up from about 9.8% the year before. The Office of Admission said in a March fact sheet that the increased admissions were put in place to meet “higher enrollment targets.”
Students from California made up the largest percentage of first-year admits at 45%, with New York, Texas, Illinois, Washington and New Jersey following in order. The admitted class also included 1,544 transfer students.
“People still really want to come to USC. The number of applicants that we had is astounding,” Kim said. “That’s a really positive sign that the university still offers amazing academic opportunities and is still a destination school for students, not just in California, but from across the country and the world.”