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.