U.S. DOJ says Yale School of Medicine discriminated based on race in admissions
First paragraphs of article:
>An investigation by the United States Department of Justice has determined that leadership at the Yale School of Medicine intentionally selected applicants based on their race.
>In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities must stop considering race in admissions, forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.
>Now, the DOJ said Yale is violating that law.
>"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," the U.S. DOJ wrote in a press release.
>The investigation found that Black and Hispanic students have a "much higher chance of admission" than white or Asian students with the same test scores. The DOJ also said that Black and Hispanic students were admitted with much lower test scores than white or Asian students, according to the release.
Commentary: This is the second med school the DOJ has gone after (UCLA earlier this year) that is accused of continuing to use race to select for students after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Yale URiM stats did not seem to change significantly post Supreme Court ruling and have consistently been above the national mean (nationally, about 15.4% of medical students are URM, Yale's stats: 24% URiM for Class of 2026 -> 35% Class of 2027 -> 28% for Class of 2028)
One interesting legal aspect of all this is that the Supreme Court majority's opinion did hold that "prohibiting the use of race in admissions does not stop universities from considering a student's discussion of how their race had affected their life" which leads to some ambiguity on how far schools can go to attempt to create a racially diverse class.
Some schools, like Yale, probably took a more liberal approach to the Supreme Court's ruling in their admission practices. It will be seen how much schools change their practice with the DOJ clearly trying to enforce a more strict interpretation of the ruling.