US Justice Dept accuses Yale medical school of discriminating against white and Asian applicants

WASHINGTON – The US Justice Department on May 14 accused the Yale School of Medicine of violating antidiscrimination laws, the second major medical school targeted in the past eight days by the Trump administration over admissions policies the government said illegally favoured black and hispanic applicants over more qualified white and Asian students.

Last week, the Justice Department issued similar findings for the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In March, the department also opened investigations into admissions policies for medical schools at Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of California, San Diego. And in February, it sued Harvard University, seeking more detailed admissions data.

Ms Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said Yale was subverting a 2023 Supreme Court decision that overturned race-conscious admissions policies by relying on “proxies” to determine the ethnicity of its applicants.

“This department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law,” Ms Dhillon said in a statement.

In a statement on May 14, Yale said the students it admitted “demonstrate exceptional academic achievement and personal commitment” and that it was “confident in the rigourous admissions process.”

This kind of holistic review process is viewed by the Trump administration as a workaround. In a six-page letter describing her findings, Ms Dhillon said Yale was using holistic reviews “to uncover and then use applicants’ race through direct and indirect means. It then conducts interviews that enable the committee to know applicants’ race and ethnicity.”

Ms Dhillon’s letter said that applicant-level data provided by Yale show “virtually no difference in racial preferences of Yale admissions” before and after the Supreme Court ruling.

The lack of change in admissions outcomes showed “a willful failure to comply with that decision,” she wrote.

Across the country, Black students account for 10.3 per cent of the total medical school enrollment, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. About 14 per cent of the nation’s population is Black. Hispanic people make up about 20 per cent of the US population and about 12.3 per cent of all medical students in the country.

A study published in 2025 by UCLA doctors, which was based on two decades of research, showed that Black and Hispanic patients treated by doctors of similar race or ethnicity led to increased communication, patient satisfaction, shared decision-making and better adherence to treatment plans. NYTIMES