The U.S. Justice Department said Thursday that Yale School of Medicine admissions were biased in favor of Black and Hispanic applicants, escalating a federal challenge to race-conscious practices at one of the country’s most prominent medical schools.
The department said it was seeking to enter into a voluntary resolution agreement with Yale University after an investigation it said showed the school violated the law by intentionally discriminating based on race in its admissions. Yale School of Medicine said it was confident in its rigorous admissions process and would carefully review the department’s letter.
At the center of the federal findings is a familiar but sharply contested claim: that Black and Hispanic applicants were, on average, admitted with lower academic qualifications than White and Asian applicants. The Justice Department said its investigation showed that, in general, Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts.
The allegation lands three years after the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities in 2023, striking down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. That ruling has become the legal backdrop for a new wave of federal scrutiny aimed at higher education admissions, especially in medicine, where diversity has long been treated as part of training for patient care.
Last week, the Justice Department cited findings of a similar probe to say admissions practices at the University of California, Los Angeles’ medical school were biased in favor of Black and Hispanic applicants. UCLA’s medical school said its admissions practices were based on merit and grounded in a rigorous, comprehensive review of each applicant.
Yale has previously said it does not discriminate in admissions against any racial or ethnic group, and it has not yet faced a direct attempt by the Trump administration to cut off federal funding. But the pressure is mounting. Yale’s lobbying expenditures in 2025 were $1.24 million, more than double what it spent in 2024, a sign of how closely the university is tracking a political fight that now reaches from the courtroom to Capitol Hill.
The immediate question is not whether Yale will deny the allegations; it already has. It is whether the administration will try to turn the findings into something stronger than a letter and a proposed agreement, and whether Yale will accept any settlement that changes how one of the nation’s most selective medical schools chooses its next class.
