After a year of investigation, the Justice Department’s letter arrived at 333 Cedar Street in New Haven, the address of the Yale School of Medicine for more than 200 years. It contained the kind of charge that has defined institutions for a generation: that the admissions office had actively researched ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s explicit ban on racial consideration by using so-called “racial proxies.” Not by accident. Not carelessly. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division claims that this was done on purpose.
This was meant to be resolved by the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was violated by college and university admissions practices, the court ruled 6-3. The message was sent to every medical school in the nation. The majority claimed to have complied. After analyzing applicant-level data, the Justice Department, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, concluded that there was “virtually no difference” in admissions outcomes prior to and following the decision. The department had spent the previous year investigating whether Yale actually did. From the DOJ’s point of view, the numbers just remained unchanged.
The Civil Rights Division presented some startling statistics. A Black applicant’s chances of getting an interview were “as much as 29 times higher” than those of an equally qualified Asian applicant with the same academic credentials, according to the department’s preliminary review. Courts will eventually determine whether that figure holds up under full legal scrutiny. However, as a statement about what the data revealed, it is a figure that is difficult to ignore without a compelling counterargument, and Yale’s public response, although calm and assured in tone, did not specifically address it. The school stated that it would “carefully review” the department’s letter and that its admitted students “demonstrate exceptional academic achievement and personal commitment.” That institutional response makes sense. It’s not a refutation.
For months, the DOJ has been constructing this case throughout the medical school system. It filed a lawsuit against Harvard in February for allegedly withholding admissions information. It requested years’ worth of application records from UC San Diego, Stanford, and Ohio State in March. It announced an investigation into the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA last week. Yale is the most recent addition to a list that is expanding in a way that indicates this is not a collection of sporadic grievances but rather a purposeful and concerted attempt to determine whether prestigious medical programs changed their conduct in response to the Supreme Court’s decision, or if they merely changed their wording without changing their methods.
Observing this unfold institution by institution gives the impression that the DOJ is carrying out something more akin to a systematic audit than a conventional enforcement campaign. It seems to be asking whether the medical education pipeline, which determines who becomes a doctor in America, which specialties are staffed, and which communities are served, changed at all in response to a Supreme Court ruling that was meant to be revolutionary, rather than just whether specific schools violated the law. The initial response is that it mostly didn’t, at least according to the DOJ’s evaluation of Yale.
Yale School of Medicine, which was established in 1810 and has one of the most illustrious research and clinical training programs in the world, may now face legal repercussions, including the potential loss of federal funding, which is the financial mechanism that gives Title VI enforcement significance for any medical school. It’s still unclear how this process will unfold, whether Yale will vigorously challenge the results, or whether a negotiated settlement akin to those reached in previous DOJ investigations might be reached. The institution that trained Harvey Cushing and helped pioneer the use of antibiotics in the United States will have to answer in court for what its admissions office did after June 2023, as the accusation is now public and the data has been reviewed.
