The DOJ announced Thursday that a year-long federal investigation concluded Yale University School of Medicine had illegally considered race when selecting students for its incoming classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, sent a letter to Yale’s lawyers detailing exactly how the school allegedly pulled it off.
The numbers are direct. In Yale’s most recent admitted class, Black students had a median GPA of 3.88 and scored in the 95th percentile on the MCAT. White students posted a 3.97 median GPA and scored in the 100th percentile. Asian students matched that: a 3.98 GPA and 100th percentile scores. These aren’t rounding errors. They’re a consistent gap across multiple admissions cycles.
Dhillon put it plainly: “Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform. This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.”
Yale’s response was boilerplate. The university said it was “confident in the rigorous admissions process we follow” and would review the DOJ letter. Its statement praised admitted students for their “exceptional academic achievement and personal commitment.” It didn’t address the data.
The DOJ also flagged a presentation from Yale’s Admissions Committee Retreat, in which the school used California universities as a model for getting around the Harvard ruling. Specifically, the University of California, Davis, was cited as an example of how to “double adjust” a socioeconomic advantage bonus, effectively creating a proxy for race without naming race. Before that manipulation, underrepresented minorities made up 10.7% of one UC Davis cohort. After the double adjustment, they made up 22.7%.
This is the core of what federal investigators are now calling out across the country. The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases was supposed to settle the question. It didn’t. Schools simply went underground. They swapped explicit racial categories for socioeconomic proxies, geographic “diversity” metrics, and other adjustments calibrated to produce racially predetermined outcomes.
The DOJ is seeking a voluntary resolution agreement with Yale, meaning it wants the school to change its practices without going to court. Yale has the option to comply. It also has the option to fight it, and the federal government has made clear it will litigate if necessary.
