After a two-year investigation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) claimed that Yale University has illegally discriminated against “dozens of white and Asian” students in its admission process.
“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” said Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Eric Dreiband. The investigation revealed that Yale “rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit.”
While the findings come as no surprise to most college-age kids who are white or Asian and are looking to get into Ivy League schools, it’s surprising to see the extent of the discrimination. And, of course, the rank hypocrisy from administrators seeking to assure everyone that their admissions policies are perfectly legal and give everyone an equal shot.
That’s not what DOJ found.
“Yale College could fill its entire entering class several times over with applicants who reach the 99th percentile in standardized testing and who have perfect high school grade point averages, but we do not base admission on such numbers alone,” President Peter Salovey wrote. “Rather, we look at the whole person when selecting whom to admit among the many thousands of highly qualified applicants.”
That’s what the school said in 2018 when the DOJ announced its investigation. The notion of Yale looking at “the whole person” was exposed as a fraud.
Prosecutors found that Yale has been discriminating against applicants to its undergraduate program based on their race and national origin and “that race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year.” The investigation concluded that Asian American and white students have “only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials,” the Justice Department said.
If this isn’t a “quota system,” I don’t know what is.
The investigation also found that Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes.”
Let’s hear it for “diversity!”
The Supreme Court ruled on several occasions that colleges can use race in admissions in certain circumstances, including the goal of having a broadly diverse student body. But everyone knows that almost all schools give a wink and a nudge to that concept. It’s easier to just slap a label on a kid’s forehead and choose the freshman class based on what color they are. Then school authorities can go to the public and brag about how “diverse” their student body is.
Parents fall for that baloney at their own peril.
I agree that test scores should not be the most important determining factor in admissions. But there are clearly superior white and Asian students who are denied a place at elite schools through no fault of their own.
School admissions are arbitrary enough without having race be a determining factor.
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