Trump targets Yale medical school over race-based admissions

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (CN) — The Justice Department announced Thursday its finding that the Yale School of Medicine discriminated based on race in its admissions practice, which the agency says elevated Black and Hispanic applicants with “consistently lower academic qualifications” than their white and Asian counterparts.

Following a yearlong probe during President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division concluded the Ivy League school’s leadership deliberately advanced medical school applicants in part based on their race and national origin, through an approach incompatible with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College.

The DOJ says in its findings letter admissions data shows Yale studied how to use racial proxies to get around the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students, resulting in Black and Hispanic students having a much higher chance of getting into Yale than white or Asian students with the same test scores.

“Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in an announcement Thursday. “This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.”

Representatives for the Yale School of Medicine did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday afternoon.

The Justice Department previously sued Yale University over similar accusations of discriminatory admissions practice in 2020 late in Trump’s first term, but the suit was quickly withdrawn just weeks into Joe Biden’s presidency the following year.

Because millions of federal tax dollars are conditioned on Yale’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Justice Department asserted Yale could not discriminate on the basis of race, color or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.

The Supreme Court historically upheld affirmative action for universities, allowing them to consider race as one of several factors in determining who is accepted into the school, but the high court’s 6-3 decision in 2023 effectively gutted race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities across the country.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying the ruling rolled back decades of progress. The Barack Obama appointee read her dissent from the bench, marking the first occurrence of the practice since June 2019.

“The court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society,” Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, Yale reached a settlement in a separate civil case brought by the organization Students for Fair Admissions, agreeing to update its training materials to make clear that race may not be used as a factor in making admissions decisions. The university also agreed to take technological steps to ensure that no person involved in making admissions decisions has access to racial data from its application services at any time during the admissions review cycle.

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