The Justice Department said Yale University School of Medicine discriminated in admissions based on race and rejected white and Asian applicants.
The Justice Department on Thursday unveiled the results of a yearlong investigation into Yale University School of Medicine’s admissions policies and practices and said its leadership selected applications based on race — favoring black and Latino students over white or Asian students.
“Yale documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ban on using race to select students,” the Justice Department said. “Yale admissions data shows that black and Hispanic students have a much greater chance of being accepted to Yale than white or Asian students with the same test scores.”“The investigation showed that, overall, Black and Latino applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their white and Asian counterparts.
These facts support the department’s finding that Yale violated the law by intentionally discriminating on the basis of race in its admissions, in clear violation of federal law, the department said.
“Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite a clear mandate for reform by the Supreme Court and the public.” Assistant Public Prosecutor Harmeet K. said: Dillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
He added: “This department will continue to highlight these illegal practices and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.”In a six-page letter describing her findings, Dillon said Yale uses comprehensive reviews “to uncover the race of applicants and then use it through direct and indirect means. It then conducts interviews that enable the committee to learn the race and ethnicity of the applicants.” Dillon’s letter said applicant-level data provided by Yale showed “virtually no difference in racial preferences for admission to Yale” before and after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
She wrote that the lack of change in admissions results demonstrated a “deliberate failure to adhere to this decision.”Last week, the Justice Department issued similar findings to the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. In March, the administration also opened investigations into the admissions policies of medical schools at Stanford University in Ohio and the University of California, San Diego.
In February, she filed a lawsuit against Harvard University to obtain more detailed admissions data, the New York Times reported.Yale has not issued a statement on the claim, but the New York Times noted that many in academia have argued that the Trump administration is imposing an incorrect interpretation of the ruling, and that the Supreme Court’s decision allowed schools to consider race while weighing factors beyond test scores, such as personality or personal development.