DOJ: By Its Own Admission, Yale Med School Illegally Discriminates

As Yale celebrated its 325th commencement last week, the institution’s medical school faced new scrutiny for alleged racial discrimination in admissions. The Department of Justice sent a letter to Yale School of Medicine on May 14 notifying it that “the Department finds that Yale continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race.”

That letter presents evidence that black and Hispanic students were significantly more likely to be admitted than white and Asian students with the same MCAT scores and grade point averages, an outcome that “cannot be explained by a coincidence.” Specifically, “Yale’s use of race resulted in a Black applicant being as much as 29 times higher odds of getting an interview for admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.”

The finding by the department that Yale Medical School continues to racially discriminate in its admissions was greeted by criticisms that seem to misunderstand what constitutes racial discrimination. For example, a radiologist named Jeff Anderson responded on X that all groups of students who were admitted to Yale Medical School had very high standardized scores: “Every last one of these are overly qualified I assure you. There’s just simply not enough seats.” The implicit argument is that once applicants have met a certain threshold on their scores, race can be used as a tie-breaker to allocate the limited number of spots.

But as far as the law is concerned, “good enough” is not good enough: Race simply cannot be used as a criterion in admissions decisions no matter how high applicants’ scores are. Yale Medical School is not obligated to accept the students with the highest test scores and is free to consider other factors, as long as race or ethnicity (or factors that are proxies for race and ethnicity) are not among them. Given the staggering differences by race in the odds of receiving an interview among similarly academically situated students, it strains credibility that Yale passes the test.