What Stanford Inherits, and What It Owes the Next Generation

Stanford University began with a death. In 1884, Leland Stanford Jr. died of typhoid fever at 15, during a family trip to Europe. His grieving parents, Leland and Jane Stanford, resolved that “the children of California shall be our children,” and in 1891 they opened a university in his memory on their farm in Palo Alto.

The Stanford Family Mausoleum, where the son and both parents are buried, still stands in a quiet grove on campus, guarded by stone sphinxes. Most students encounter it only on Halloween or on a campus tour. Yet it embodies an idea that runs through the university’s history: that one generation can deliberately invest in the next. In 2026, that idea is being tested in new ways.

The Legacy Question

For decades, Stanford, like most selective private universities, gave some weight in admissions to applicants whose parents had attended or whose families had donated. The university reported that 13.6 percent of the students it admitted in fall 2023 had such ties.

California changed the rules. A state law, AB 1780, bars private colleges whose students receive state financial aid from considering legacy or donor status in admissions. It took effect on Sept. 1, 2025. In July 2025, Stanford announced that it would withdraw from the state’s Cal Grant program rather than end the practice, Higher Ed Dive reported, and said it would replace the lost state aid with its own funds so that affected students would not be harmed.

The decision drew criticism from advocates of admissions reform, who regard legacy preferences as a mechanism for transmitting privilege. Supporters of the practice argue that alumni ties sustain the loyalty and philanthropy that fund financial aid and research. Both sides, in a sense, are arguing about inheritance: whether a university should honor the bonds of family that helped build it, or whether those bonds sit uneasily with the founders’ promise to the children of California at large.

The Generosity Question

At the same time, Stanford has made itself, for families of modest means, one of the most affordable universities in the country. Families with incomes under $100,000 and typical assets pay no tuition, room or board. Families with incomes under $150,000 pay no tuition. And the university’s student body includes a large and growing first-generation population: 21 percent of the Class of 2028 are the first in their families to attend a four-year college, according to the university’s class profile.

These students carry a different kind of inheritance: the hopes and sacrifices of parents who often did not have the chance to attend college themselves. They arrive at a university where many classmates have spent their lives around higher education, and they navigate it with fewer maps. Stanford’s support programs for first-generation and low-income students, and the communities students build for one another, have become a significant part of campus life.

Who Gets In

The broader question of who inherits a Stanford education changed in 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that colleges could no longer consider race in admissions. Since then, Stanford’s reported share of Black and Hispanic first-year students has declined, according to the university’s class profiles as reported by The Stanford Daily. The full profile for the Class of 2030 has not yet been released.

These figures are a source of concern for many students and faculty, and of debate about how a university can pursue a broad and diverse student body within the law. Student organizations have responded by strengthening community. At the start of this academic year, the Black Student Union welcomed first-year students with a convocation under the theme “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” borrowing the title of Nina Simone’s anthem.

What One Generation Owes the Next

Underneath these debates lies an older question, one the Stanfords answered in their own way: what does one generation owe the next? The founders gave their fortune. Later generations of alumni gave their gifts and, in many cases, expected their children to have a place. Today’s students are being asked to accept a university that is, in some ways, more open than ever to talent from modest backgrounds and, in other ways, still shaped by the advantages of those who came before.

There is also the question in reverse. Today’s undergraduates will one day be the alumni, donors, parents and policymakers who decide what Stanford becomes. They will inherit an institution that has weathered federal funding cuts, a new endowment tax and a contested admissions landscape. What they pass on is not yet written.

The Long View

Jane Stanford, who kept the university alive through financial crisis after her husband’s death in 1893, understood that institutions endure only when each generation chooses to sustain them. The mausoleum in the grove is a reminder that Stanford was never simply a place for the privileged to perpetuate themselves, nor simply an engine of mobility. It was, from the beginning, a family’s attempt to turn private loss into public good.

Whether the university lives up to that founding gesture is a question each generation of students must answer for itself. The debates over legacy, access and diversity are, at bottom, debates about how faithfully Stanford keeps the promise made in grief more than 140 years ago.

Photo: Steven Baltakatei Sandoval / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0