Last month the Department of Justice announced that it had concluded Yale’s medical school was using race as a factor in admissions.
After a year-long investigation, the Justice Department concluded that Yale School of Medicine discriminated based on race in its admissions, favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones, the agency said Thursday.
The department requested documents from Yale to determine whether its admissions practices were in compliance with federal civil rights law, and determined that the medical school “continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race,” despite a 2023 Supreme Court ruling rejecting race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.
When I wrote about this at the time, I pointed out that news outlets like the NY Times seemed anxious to avoid looking too closely at the DOJ’s explanation for its conclusions. Fortunately, it’s not hard to just quote from the letter explaining why. This excerpts starts with a mention of the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing affirmative action in college admissions, i.e. the Harvard decision.
After the Harvard decision, Yale’s documents include references to increasing student diversity using means other than admissions selections. An updated 2024 admissions guidance presentation has a slide with only the words “Admissions post-SCOTUS.” This suggests that admissions personnel are given verbal instructions during this presentation encouraging the use of race/ethnicity in admissions, and such instructions are not put in writing. Yale has also redacted for privilege (without explanation) several documents on this topic that are dated after the Harvard decision,4 including a document labeled “Guidance on Consideration of Race Updated 8.15.25.”…
In other words there are documents showing they planned to work around the decision. But did they? Evidence suggests that they did.
The Department also has evidence that Yale attempted to circumvent the Harvard decision by using racial proxies to indirectly discriminate against applicants based on race. This intent is confirmed by our data analysis below showing no change in racial disparity between admitted students before and after the Harvard decision…
The applicant-level data produced by Yale indicate that a Black or Hispanic student has a substantially higher likelihood of being offered admission than a White or Asian student with the same academic credentials. This consistent difference in the test scores between students of different racial groups is substantial and cannot be explained by a coincidence. Based on our preliminary review of the applicant-level data, Yale’s use of race resulted in a Black applicant being as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.
Today the NY Times reports that Yale is now eager to make a settlement with the DOJ.
The Trump administration is conducting a far-reaching investigation into whether Yale University’s admissions practices violate anti-discrimination laws, prompting one of the country’s most elite schools to pursue settlement talks with the government, according to three people briefed on the matter.
…the department’s review is reaching beyond the medical school, the people said, encompassing undergraduate and law school admissions as well…
Yale’s quick moves to try to reach an agreement with the government suggest it does not want a high-profile, drawn-out fight similar to the one involving Harvard University. The status of a potential agreement was unclear on Friday, but Yale recently offered a proposal to the government, according to the three people briefed on the matter.
Despite the evidence that Yale seems to be violating the Supreme Court’s decision, the Times argues that the Trump administration is misreading the decision.
In that decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that an applicant “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” though he said that the opinion should not be “construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”
Pointing to Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion, many schools believe they can consider race among other factors in the context of admissions essays or interviews. But the administration has interpreted the court’s ruling to mean that schools may not consider race in any way.
The Trump administration’s interpretation is correct. Race may not be considered in admissions decisions. Chief Justice Roberts was merely saying that it’s okay for students to write an essay about how they personally have been impacted by race. Their personal efforts to overcome adversity connected to race can be considered by admissions offices but no collective (i.e. race-based) advantage can be given to every member of a group.
However, writing a strong essay is one factor among many. It certainly should not grant members of one race a 29X advantage over people from another race. Also, it’s entirely possible that Asian applicants could write an essay about their interactions with race. But they don’t seem to be benefitting from doing so with Yale’s admissions department.
Something is going on here and it has been obvious to a lot of people since long before last month. Back in September of 2024 I wrote about allegations that Yale was cheating and ignoring the Harvard decision. Those critiques were based on the fact that Yale’s Black enrollment was unchanged in the first year after the decision was issued.
Asian American enrollment dropped…to 24 percent from 30 percent at Yale…At the same time, Black enrollment…stayed at 14 percent at Yale
That should not be possible according to Yale itself, which presented the court with an amicus brief predicting that the end of affirmative action would result in a drop in black enrollment.
In a joint amicus brief that the University submitted to the Supreme Court, Yale argued that racial diversity would not be possible without directly considering race. Yet, Yale’s class of 2028 did not see a dramatic decrease in diversity as the University predicted it would.
The amicus brief stated that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.”
Others schools, like MIT, did see a decline in that year, but not Yale. Several observers suggested it shouldn’t be possible.
“What Yale is doing is either they’re reporting a very misleading number or they’re cheating in some way,” Sander wrote to the News. “If their race numbers really don’t change, I think that means that they’re looking for any evidence they can find that a student is African American or Black, and they’re admitting them under the same criteria they were before.”
From the Wall Street Journal:
“They’re cheating. Everyone knows they’re cheating. They know they’re cheating. What they are trying to do is cheat in a way that doesn’t get them caught in court.”
That was John Yoo’s response when I asked for his reaction to the racial breakdown of freshmen at some of the most selective U.S. colleges and universities…
Citing data from the College Board, which administers the SAT, Nicholas Lemann recently wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that in 2023 “the gap between average Asian and Black test scores on the SAT was more than 300 points, and . . . nationally, fewer than 2,300 Black students got combined scores of 1400 or above, which is generally considered what a student needs to be admitted to an Ivy Plus school.” Nevertheless, black enrollment at Duke, Yale and Princeton was essentially flat this year.
It looks very much like Yale was cheating and they got caught. That’s why they’re eager to make a deal rather than try to drag this into a long fight. It’s because they’re guilty and they’re going lose if this case winds up being appealed back the Supreme Court.
Hopefully other schools that have been cheating in similar ways are paying attention.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America’s kids get the education they deserve.
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