Yesterday, we discussed how UCLA medical school has been accused of racial discrimination in admissions. Now Yale School of Medicine has also been accused of “intentionally select[ing] applicants based on their race” in knowing circumvention of Supreme Court precedent.
The Justice Department announced that “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…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.”
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon added on X that “a black applicant is 29 times more likely to be invited to interview than an Asian with equally strong academics.”
As discussed yesterday, many of us predicted that schools would knowingly evade such rulings and regulations.
After the historic ruling in the Harvard and North Carolina cases barring the use of racial criteria in admissions, administrators and academics admitted what they had long denied: that race was having a major role in admissions.
In anticipation of the rulings, many schools, including the California system, eliminated standardized testing. Without objective scores, there is less ability to identify the use of non-scholastic criteria for admissions. By eliminating or devaluing standardized testing, admissions offices can use the more subjective essays to achieve the same race-based results.
I wrote about how administrators were already preparing to use essays as an indirect way to achieve the same identifications and preferences in admissions. The essay “prompts” encourage students to effectively self-identify by discussing incidents where they faced discrimination. The shift to the essays would allow the removal of high-scoring students while elevating those with lower scores. That prediction was quickly confirmed, as top candidates were rejected based on their essays, while schools used essays to flag their backgrounds.
Interviews can serve the same function as an alternative to formal self-identification and race-based scoring.
Faculty and administrators at UCLA and other schools remain adamant in using race-based admissions. They simply justify discrimination as equity and diversity.
These schools remain hardened silos of race-based practices and policies. The same faculty and administrators are unlikely to yield unless compelled to do so. In the meantime, they will spend copious amounts of money and time fighting for differential treatment based on race. The hope is that a new Democratic administration will not enforce these rules and allow such circumvention to continue in admissions.
Come On Man! It’s impossible that Yale done wrong! The White Folk be the Slavers, Colonialists, and Supremacists keeping their foot on the neck of ‘perpetual minorities,’ right? Don’t the SCOTUS Supremacists know that racism lasts forever and is in the DNA of the Colonialists (even those with no lineage to the oppressor’s of the past)? I think that is what the 1619 Project is selling to low IQ Wokies anyway!
So Yale has become mediocrity. It represents the average. If it’s against the law file suit. PT has kept people informed.
Stay safe…
It seems there are two ideals in work. The value of objective uniform tests, and content of character through essays. How do they play out against a backdrop of AI. Does it pose risks for the scores? What if a student asks an AI agent to write a winning essay? Is the answer the admitting school using AI to treat with issues in the student’s scores and essay? Or something else?
This is similar to the South’s unlawful and unconstitutional resistance to the desegregation of the schools.
The black students admitted to Yale or UCLA would be admitted to other medical schools without this racial discrimination. This is a point Sowell and others have made for decades. So there is no need to violate the law and the constitution to educate black doctors.
I hope Harmeet Dhillon brings enforcement actions wherever possible, and that the administration does everything it can to withhold federal funds under Title VI.
Justice Roberts never should have suggested that essays could be used to circumvent the law and constitution. Instead, he should have said that subterfuges like this would not be tolerated.
Comparing holistic medical admissions to the Jim Crow South’s resistance to desegregation is a massive stretch. The segregation of the South was a system designed to completely shut out Black Americans from public life and education.
Holistic admissions are completely different; they are designed to find the very best individual students by looking at their entire life story, rather than just a single test score.The idea that Black students who are accepted to Yale or UCLA would just be fine at “other” medical schools misses a major point about how medicine works. Elite medical schools are the main places that train the nation’s top medical researchers, professors, and healthcare leaders. Shunting qualified minority students away from these top-tier institutions simply locks them out of high-level medical leadership, which hurts the entire medical field.
Furthermore, Chief Justice John Roberts did not create an illegal backdoor trick in the SFFA v. Harvard ruling. He laid down a very clear, logical rule: a school cannot give a student automatic bonus points just for checking a racial box. However, a school is absolutely allowed to reward an individual student who writes an essay showing how they built resilience or leadership while overcoming hard times, including racial discrimination.
Evaluating someone’s actual character and what they have survived is not an unlawful trick. It is treating applicants as real, unique human beings, which is exactly what the Constitution requires.