Justice Department accuses Yale medical school of illegal race-based admissions

The Justice Department accused Yale School of Medicine of illegally selecting applicants based on race, making the New Haven institution the second major medical school targeted in eight days as the Trump administration broadens its challenge to admissions policies after the Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative-action ruling.

On May 14, 2026, the department said it had completed a year-long investigation and concluded that Yale’s leadership intentionally chose applicants on the basis of race. Federal officials said the school studied how to use racial proxies to get around the Supreme Court’s ban on considering race in university admissions, and said admissions data showed Black and Hispanic applicants had a much higher chance of being admitted than White or Asian applicants with the same test scores.

The department also said 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 the Civil Rights Division, said Yale had continued a race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s mandate for reform. The department said it would keep targeting illegal race-based admissions practices at medical schools.

The Yale finding followed a similar announcement against the University of California, Los Angeles, on May 6, 2026, underscoring how medical schools have become a central target in the administration’s effort to police the limits of diversity programs. That focus matters because medical schools have long argued that physician diversity is tied to better care, broader access and stronger trust in communities that have historically been underserved.

Yale has publicly defended its diversity efforts since the Supreme Court’s June 29, 2023 decision. Peter Salovey, then Yale’s president, said the university would reaffirm its commitment to an inclusive, diverse and excellent educational environment and would use all lawful means to foster diversity. Yale researchers later published a 2025 study with NYU researchers finding that underrepresented-in-medicine applicants were less likely to be admitted and enrolled after the ruling. In that study, 2024 acceptance rates for underrepresented applicants were 9% lower than White applicants’ and 7% lower than Asian applicants’. The share of enrolled medical students from underrepresented groups fell from 24.4% to 20.8%.

Yale had also already faced scrutiny over race-conscious admissions, including a 2018 Justice Department investigation and a 2025 complaint from the Asian American Coalition for Education that alleged use of race proxies. The new federal finding places pressure on medical schools nationwide to rethink how they recruit, select and defend efforts to maintain diversity without running afoul of the post-affirmative action legal line.