Justice Department Accuses Yale and UCLA Medical Schools of Race-Based Admissions

The Justice Department on Thursday accused the Yale School of Medicine of violating anti-discrimination laws through its admissions policies. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said the school relied on racial proxies to determine the ethnicity of applicants after the 2023 Supreme Court decision that overturned race-conscious admissions policies.

The department issued similar findings last week for the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. In March it opened investigations into admissions policies for medical schools at Stanford, Ohio State and the University of California, San Diego.

In February the department sued Harvard University seeking more detailed admissions data.

Yale’s documents show that its leadership intentionally selected applicants based on their race, according to the Justice Department. The department stated that the school studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students.

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 median MCAT score for white and Asian admissions is at the 100th percentile while scores for Black and Hispanic students are lower.

The department said Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts. The pattern worsened over the three most recent admissions classes following the Supreme Court ruling.