Kamal Ghorui
The Justice Department Thursday revealed its findings of a year-long investigation into the admission policies and practices at the Yale School of Medicine and said its leadership selected applications based on race — favored Black and Hispanic students than White or Asians. “Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students. Yale’s admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores,” the Justice Department said.“The investigation showed that, in general, Black and Hispanic 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 based on race in its admissions, in clear violation of federal law,” the department said.“Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform.” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.”In a six-page letter describing her findings, Dhillon said Yale was using holistic reviews “to uncover and then use applicants’ race through direct and indirect means. It then conducts interviews that enable the committee to know applicants’ race and ethnicity.” Dhillon’s letter said that applicant-level data provided by Yale show “virtually no difference in racial preferences of Yale admissions” before and after the Supreme Court ruling. The lack of change in admissions outcomes showed “a willful failure to comply with that decision,” she wrote.Last week, the Justice Department issued similar findings for the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. In March, the department also opened investigations into admissions policies for medical schools at Stanford, Ohio State and the University of California, San Diego. And in February, it sued Harvard University, seeking more detailed admissions data, New York Times reported.Yale did not issue a statement on the claim but NYT observed that many in academia have argued that the Trump administration is imposing an incorrect interpretation of the ruling, and that the Supreme Court decision allowed for schools to consider race while weighing factors beyond test scores, such as character or personal growth.
