Three years after the Supreme Court’s 2023 landmark decision to strike down racial preferences in college admissions, the federal government is still triple-checking whether elite universities got the memo.
Recent agreements with Brown University and Northwestern University show the toll institutions pay for burying racial preferences under new language and “holistic review.” For Northwestern, that price was to the tune of $75 million to the United States, while Brown entered a voluntary agreement with the Department of Justice requiring extensive and strict admissions-data reporting.
In June, the DOJ even announced that it opened 15 new investigations into potential race discrimination at medical schools around the country.
Now Yale has the privilege of being under the microscope. After a year-long investigation into Yale School of Medicine, the DOJ found in May that the school intentionally discriminated by race in admissions. On July 13, Yale President Maurie McInnis confirmed that DOJ investigations are also pending into the admissions processes of Yale College and Yale Law School.
The DOJ claims that Yale documents referenced efforts to drive student diversity through alternative means of admission selection. A 2024 admissions guidance presentation that had a slide with only the words “Admissions post-SCOTUS” is alleged by the DOJ to suggest “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.”
The investigation also says that from Yale’s 2023–2025 admitted classes, there were significant racial gaps in median MCAT and GPA scores. Based on the data, the DOJ found Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts. Yale’s use of race, according to the DOJ, resulted in a Black applicant having as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for Yale School of Medicine than an Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.
In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court clearly laid out that race cannot be used as a negative or a stereotype, and cannot be smuggled back in through essays or other means. Universities are, of course, still allowed to consider an individual applicant’s experience, including race, and how it has played a role in their life. But they cannot emphasize race as a factor more important than an applicant’s character, ability, or achievement in their admissions practices.
McInnis says that the school is taking its Students for Fair Admissions obligations and the DOJ investigation seriously, and will comply and participate in good faith. Yale has even reiterated a commitment to academic strength as the largest factor in admissions, but the question mark over the process has left a blot on the school’s trustworthiness.
What the application portal says at the top of the webpage does not mean much if the “holistic review” process is only a way to wink and nod at the racial agenda the school values over academic strength.
Yale can insist all it likes that academic strength remains central to its admissions. It and other elite universities have shown by their actions, though, that dressing the whole thing in the familiar language of “holistic review” and “lived experience” is simply preserving their racial preferences by moving them from the checkbox to the file note. The recent and continuing DOJ investigations show that the Supreme Court decision only taught admissions offices to stop putting their racial preferences in writing.
