There was a time in America when race played a significant role in limiting opportunities for some citizens based on race. Blacks, for example, couldn’t share the same public spaces as whites, whether at coffee shop counters, water fountains, classrooms, or the workplace.

The idea of giving preferential treatment to one race was appalling and immoral to millions. But over time, we’ve progressed toward a more colorblind society. As Martin Luther King Jr. once proclaimed, “I have a dream that my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Despite all the progress, some still believe race should be a determining factor in many situations, including college and university admissions. In the early 2010s, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education forced member schools to comply with strict DEI regulations. Since that time, colleges and universities have felt compelled to meet those standards and increasingly considered race a prominent factor in admissions.

In order to keep their accreditation, medical schools across the country developed racist admissions systems to ensure they complied with the agency’s edict. Evidently, Yale is among them.

Then, three years after the Supreme Court’s 2023 rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, which held that race-based admissions were unconstitutional, many universities deceptively continued their policies. In other words, they were doing the exact opposite of what civil rights advocates had worked hard to overcome: giving people special treatment based on the color of their skin.

In the Harvard case, Justice Clarence Thomas joined with the majority and explained, “To satisfy strict scrutiny, universities must be able to establish an actual link between racial discrimination and educational benefits. Second, those engaged in racial discrimination do not deserve deference with respect to their reasons for discriminating. Third, attempts to remedy past governmental discrimination must be closely tailored to address that particular past governmental discrimination.”

None of the universities currently being scrutinized by the Department of Justice has met these standards or provided a clear justification for race-based admissions other than preferential treatment of one group over another. The racial check boxes on college applications fail to account for applicants’ experiences, skills, or knowledge. They were merely categorized by the color of their skin and given special treatment based on that factor alone.

As National Review reports, “Admissions staff at Yale University’s medical school used ‘racial proxies’ and ‘intentionally selected applicants based on their race’ to the benefit of black and Hispanic students, despite a Supreme Court ruling that affirmative action is illegal, according to a new report from the Department of Justice.” Furthermore, “The DOJ investigation found that the medical school’s orientation instructional packet for admissions staff included a graphic developed by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which includes ‘race’ and ‘national origin’ as traits to be considered in a holistic applicant assessment. That same graphic was used by UCLA’s medical school in guidance documents for its admissions team, as seen in documents released by the DOJ last week regarding its investigation into UCLA.”

Yale blatantly ignored the Supreme Court’s rulings and didn’t even bother to hide its race-based system.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes, “The median score for white and Asian admissions is the 100th percentile. Anything less than perfect means white and Asian students have to apply elsewhere. For everyone else, there is a significantly lower bar for entry. This was not an anomalous result from a single year, either, but a progression in discrimination over three years. Yale actually got worse after the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences.”

Yale isn’t alone in its obsession with clinging to Woke admissions policies. The DOJ also found similar violations at UCLA, Ohio State, Stanford, and Harvard. And while the impact of these racist policies may seem limited to only those applying to medical school, there’s a broader ripple effect that goes far beyond the application process.

Jukka Savolainen and April Bleske-Rechek write at City Journal, “Once universities appear to subordinate meritocratic standards to demographic balancing, public trust begins to erode. Students question whether standards are applied consistently. Patients wonder whether admissions decisions are politically managed. Institutions lose legitimacy precisely because they seem unwilling to confront obvious empirical realities.” They add, “The Department of Justice is right to force this conversation.”

Tackling this problem also took some intervention from the White House. Thanks to a 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump that threatened to revoke the Liaison Committee on Medical Education’s authority, the accreditation agency has removed its DEI requirements. Another organization, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, has followed suit.

As Chief Justice John Roberts once said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” After many decades of struggling to overcome racial preferences and create a more equal society, the decisions by these universities to deny students an education based on race took our country back decades. Hopefully, the DOJ investigations can put a stop to racial discrimination and ensure that applicants are evaluated on merit alone.