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The Justice Department has accused Yale’s medical school of illegally giving Black and Hispanic applicants a leg up over white and Asian ones in admissions.
Getting into it: In a yearlong investigation, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division concluded that Yale leadership intentionally picked applicants based on race and studied how to use “racial proxies” to get around a 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. The department said its review of Yale’s data showed a Black applicant could be up to 29 times more likely than a comparably qualified Asian applicant to land an admissions interview.
According to the DOJ, Yale’s latest class had Black students sitting at a median 3.88 GPA and a 95th-percentile MCAT score, while white and Asian students posted slightly higher GPAs and MCAT scores in the 100th percentile. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, said in a six-page letter that Yale’s “holistic” review let admissions officers figure out and factor in each applicant’s race, and that the school’s admissions numbers barely budged after the 2023 ruling, which she said proved Yale deliberately ignored it. Because of this, the DOJ said Yale violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and is seeking a voluntary resolution before it takes them to court.
In response to the DOJ’s announcement, a spokeswoman for Yale said, “We will carefully review the Department of Justice’s letter.” She added, “Yale School of Medicine is confident in the rigorous admissions process we follow.”
Notably, Yale is the second medical school hit with discrimination findings in just over a week, after the department reached similar conclusions about UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. The DOJ has also opened investigations into medical schools across the country.
