The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday said that Yale University had discriminated against white and Asian American applicants for admission, violating federal civil-rights law. Race, the department said, is the “determinative factor” in hundreds of the institution’s admissions decisions each year.
The findings stem from a two-year federal investigation of Yale in response to a complaint that a handful of Asian American organizations — led by the Asian American Coalition for Education — filed in 2016. The department said in a letter to Yale’s lawyers that, for the great majority of applicants, white and Asian American students have “only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission” as Black students with comparable academic credentials.
In an email, Karen Peart, a spokeswoman for Yale, disputed the Justice Department’s findings, saying that Yale’s practices comply with decades of Supreme Court precedent. The institution, she wrote, has been cooperating fully with the department’s investigation: “We are dismayed that the DOJ has made its determination before allowing Yale to provide all the information the department has requested thus far.”
Let’s pause to let déjà vu sink in. Yes, we’ve been here many times before, bombarded by breathless breaking-news reports about a superselective university’s allegedly discriminatory admissions practices. But, no, the Justice Department’s announcement almost certainly does not, as some trigger-happy social-media prognosticators suggested on Thursday, signal the end of race-conscious admissions programs as we know them. Nor does it necessarily mean that Yale is in the wrong.
Let’s review a bit. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions programs for nearly half a century. In 2016, the high court clarified its definition of legally sound race-conscious policies in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. In short, colleges may consider an applicant’s race as one of many factors.
Last fall, a federal judge ruled that Harvard University does not discriminate against Asian American students through its consideration of applicants’ race and ethnicity (that ruling was appealed, and oral arguments before the First Circuit Court of Appeals are scheduled for September).
We don’t know the real underlying facts. It doesn’t mean that Yale is toast or that it’s going to be in the Supreme Court tomorrow.
In an interview with The Chronicle on Thursday, Arthur L. Coleman, co-founder and managing partner at EducationCounsel, cautioned that an agency’s finding is not the same as a judge’s ruling.
“This is a top-line conclusion without any details or analytical precision underlining the findings,” Coleman said of the Justice Department’s letter to Yale. “We get the conclusions, but we don’t know the real underlying facts. It doesn’t mean that Yale is toast or that it’s going to be in the Supreme Court tomorrow.”
The “likelihood of admission” passage in the Justice Department’s letter echoes language found in previous lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions programs at other colleges. But the notion that one can look at, say, two applicants’ ACT or SAT scores alone and determine their relative odds of admission is problematic. Yale, like many highly selective colleges, relies on a “holistic review” process that takes applicants’ various attributes and achievements into account, including their background, academic opportunities, leadership experience, and likelihood of contributing to the campus.
“My speculation is that the department is grounding judgments about the relative qualifications of applicants based on their ACT and SAT scores and grade-point averages,” said Coleman, a former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. “What that analysis misses is that in holistic review, you do not read SAT scores in isolation. Instead, you’re looking at the intersection of all these factors, including SAT scores.”
Imagine two applicants, each with a 1250 SAT score. One grew up in a wealthy neighborhood and attended a well-resourced school; the other grew up in a low-income home and attended a underresourced school. The difference in context often matters when considering a test score.
Thursday’s announcement was the Trump administration’s latest swipe at race-conscious admissions policies. Earlier this year, the Justice Department filed an amicus brief urging the First Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule the lower court’s decision in the Harvard case, arguing that the university’s use of race had “repeatedly penalized” Asian American applicants.
In a written statement on Thursday, the Justice Department said that Yale’s consideration of race in admissions is “anything but limited,” that the university uses race at multiple steps of its admissions process, and that it “racially balances” its classes.
In the 2019-20 academic year, Yale enrolled a first-year class of 1,550 students. Thirty-six percent were white, 22 percent were Asian American, and 8 percent were Black, the university reported.
In its letter to Yale’s lawyers, the Justice Department demanded that the university agree not to use race or national origin in its upcoming 2020-21 admissions cycle. “If Yale proposes to consider race or national origin in future admissions cycles,” the letter says, “it must first submit to the Department of Justice a plan demonstrating that its proposal is narrowly tailored as required by law, including by identifying a date for the end of race discrimination.”
Don’t expect Yale to undo it admissions policy this fall, though. “We are proud of Yale’s admissions practices,” Peart, the university spokeswoman wrote, “and we will not change them on the basis of such a meritless, hasty accusation.”
