No I am not arguing for or against affirmative action in college admissions. I am Black and graduated from an HBCU. I haven’t had a reason to think about affirmative action deeply enough to have an informed opinion.
The (aggregate) government is the only one who can, as it's the only one who granted the status. The idea that something is ironclad because it's enshrined in law, is a failing to consider history. Laws change.
If you want to argue that it's unlikely, this also depends largely on those who have the money (or power) to fight for the change. I would agree there is not enough public sentiment, despite the wealth inequality implications, for private universities. Planned Parenthood? I think we got awful close.
Either way, it could be done. It is important not to dismiss the possibility.
And if you want to compare it to a bank - a bank pays taxes
But the answer is that legacy is a one-hop removed racial bias instead of a direct one, where the schools engaging in it can claim that it's based on a purely financial incentive and that it applies equally to all of their legacies. It's like money laundering for bias: Finding a proxy metric that happens to correlate extremely well with race but never explicitly mentions it. With the current supreme court, that laundering seems kinda likely to succeed.
Since legacy admissions come first, schools which practice affirmative action have a heavy bias against the predominant race (because those slots are all filled by legacy candidate). Which means that if you're of the predominant race, you have next to no chance to be accepted by these universities... (I mean, everyone has next to no chance, but for people of the predominant race, they are discriminated against severely).
In general, though, college admissions are pretty terrible... Having spoken with someone who worked in admissions at one of these universities, if you have a bright kid, you're better off moving to the middle of nowhere to make sure they're the valedictorian, rather than trying to send your kid to a great high school where why might only be salutatorian. Why? For smaller schools they rarely take more than one student from that school in any given year, so when the valedictorian who filled out applications to 10 top schools gets in to all 10? The salutatorian doesn't...
I don't disagree with anything you're arguing from a moral perspective. I'm not a big fan of what's happening at the supreme court these days.
We may get to find out: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/26/1190123323/department-of-educ...