The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has accused Yale School of Medicine (Yale) of illegal discrimination along racial lines during its admissions process. The DOJ specifically claimed that “Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts.”

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, wrote that Yale violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as interpreted by the US Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. In that 2023 case, the court held that race-based admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Dhillon compared race-based admission data before and after the Supreme Court ruling. She concluded that there was “virtually no difference” in the data and that “the lack of any change in Yale’s admissions outcomes after Harvard evidence a willful failure to comply with that decision.”

Dhillon said that Yale uses a holistic admissions process to determine the race of applicants, which it then considers. Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than white and Asian candidates, according to the press release.

She stated, “Based on our preliminary review of the applicant-level data, 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 DOJ has recently made similar accusations against other schools. Last week, it announced an investigation of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In March, the DOJ demanded years of admission data from the medical schools at Stanford, Ohio State, and the University of California, San Diego. In February, the DOJ sued Harvard University, accusing it of withholding admissions data that the DOJ wants as part of an investigation to determine whether Harvard is continuing to discriminate on the basis of race.