“Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants on the basis of their race each year,” disapproving applicants of those races compared to African-American applicants with similar academic references, the Justice Department said in a statement Thursday.
The announcement, the culmination of a two-year civil rights inquiry launched by a complaint by Asian-American groups, represents the latest move by the Trump administration to endorse policies for affirmative action that have reinforced decades of higher education.
The school’s admissions process, the Justice Department said, is a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Yale must stop the use of race as a national origin in its upcoming admissions cycle or get signed off on a plan that it continues. of use the department, officials told the school.
In a statement, a Yale spokeswoman said the school “categorically denies this accusation” and called it a “meritorious” and “hasty” determination.
Yale said they had provided the Department of Justice with “a substantial amount of information and data” so far, but were unable to provide any information the department had requested prior to Thursday’s conclusion, that ‘ t was shared with the university in a letter earlier in the day.
“Had the department received this information fully and waited fairly long, it would have concluded that Yale’s practices absolutely complied with decades of Supreme Court precedent,” said Karen Peart, director of the School of University Media Relations, adding that the school their policy would not change.
The Supreme Court has long established affirmative action on campus, allowing universities to consider an applicant’s race under many factors, toward the goal of greater campus diversity, and banning rasquota in permits.
A federal judge in Boston last year faced a similar challenge by an Asian American student body against Harvard, ruling that while Harvard’s admissions process is “not perfect”, it would not “dismantle a very fine admissions program that fits through constitutional pattern, only because it could do better. ”The student body appealed that decision.
The Trump administration has filed a “declaration of importance” in the Harvard case, siding with the students’ challengers and noting that the administration is investigating Harvard’s screening process following complaints from the Department of Education of more than 60 Asian-American groups . The Obama administration had felt and rejected similar complaints.
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