Under pressure from state lawmakers and civil-rights activists, the president of Texas A&M University at College Station announced on Friday that his institution would no longer give an edge to applicants who are related to alumni.

"In an admissions process based on individual merit and potential contribution to the university community, prior affiliation with Texas A&M should not be a criterion," Robert M. Gates said in a written statement announcing his decision.

The statement said that, having consulted with each member of the Texas A&M University System's Board of Regents, Mr. Gates had decided that, effective immediately, his institution would "no longer award points for legacy in the admissions-review process."

Mr. Gates's announcement followed a week in which the university came under heavy fire for its policy of giving the children, grandchildren, and siblings of alumni 4 extra points on the 100-point scale that it uses to evaluate applicants for undergraduate admission.

Much criticism of the 15-year-old policy had come from advocates for minority students, who were outraged by Mr. Gates's decision last month not to use race-conscious admissions criteria, even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that colleges could consider race. The advocates argued that legacy admissions clearly belied Mr. Gates's stated goal of wanting to admit applicants based solely on their merit.

Admissions policies that favor the immediate relatives of alumni are fairly common in American higher education. Defenders of the policies say they encourage intergenerational bonds among alumni, unity in the student body, loyalty to alma mater, and donations.

Texas A&M's legacy policy had been controversial for some time, but the protests against it intensified in response to an article, published January 3 in the Houston Chronicle, that analyzed university data to show how the policy affects enrollment.

The article concluded that, in each of the past few years, legacy status had been the deciding factor in the admission of more than 300 white freshmen -- an amount roughly equal to the total number of black applicants admitted to Texas A&M. Only a handful of black applicants receive legacy points each year, a situation resulting in part from past discrimination by the university, which did not accept any black students until 1963.

The university's undergraduate enrollment is 82 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black, and 3 percent Asian-American.

Last week, critics of the legacy policy held news conferences in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio. Among those attending were several state lawmakers, two Democratic members of Congress -- Reps. Chris Bell and Sheila Jackson Lee -- and representatives of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Urban League.

State Rep. Paul Moreno, a Democrat from El Paso, told reporters that the university's legacy policy was "nothing more than conservative affirmative action."

In subsequent interviews, State Rep. Garnet F. Coleman, a Democrat who is chairman of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, said it was "so hypocritical" for the university to espouse the values of an objective admissions process while "awarding admissions points to a student just because of bloodline."

And State Rep. Lon Burnam, a Democrat from Fort Worth, said he planned to propose a state law prohibiting the legacy policy, which he called "an untenable concept" and an obstacle to the admission of black students. He had proposed similar measures twice before, only to see them die in legislative committees. But he said there appeared to be more support for such a measure now.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Gates argued that the local news media had exaggerated the legacy policy's impact on admissions. The president said that legacy status played no role at all in the admission of three-fourths of the university's students, who are admitted automatically based on their class rank or test scores. Among the remaining students, he said, the university had accepted 353 legacy applicants, but had rejected 500, in putting together the freshman class that enrolled last fall.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gates said he did not seek to dispute the criticisms of the legacy policy, because "we were already well on our way to the decision to make the policy changes when the articles appeared."

"It is a difficult decision, but one that had to be made to maintain consistency in an admissions policy based on individual merit and the whole person," he said.

In his written statement, Mr. Gates said the family members of university alumni "add value to what makes those institutions unique." He also said, however, that Texas A&M's culture and the attachment that people feel to it "are not the result of 4 out of 100 points on an admissions evaluation."

He apologized for the negative publicity that the university had received as a result of his failure to eliminate the legacy policy sooner, saying that "public perceptions of the fairness and equity of our process clearly are important."

Several leading critics of the legacy policy welcomed its abandonment, but also said that they believe Texas A&M still needs to adopt a race-conscious admissions policy, to increase its minority enrollment.

The critics argued that the chief legal obstacle to race-conscious admissions was removed last June, when the Supreme Court upheld the use of affirmative action in admissions in two cases involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and thereby effectively negated a 1996 federal-court decision barring such policies in Texas and two other states.

"This issue is far from over," Representative Coleman said.