Colleges Are Still Discriminating by Race

In 2023, the Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard said that it was unconstitutional to discriminate in college admissions based on race. But since then we've seen pretty strong evidence that some schools are doing their best to cheat their way around this ruling.

In the past two years, the Trump administration has accused a bunch of specific schools of cheating.

In May, the Trump administration opened a new front in its crackdown on the higher education sector. 

The U.S. Department of Justice said it had completed a yearlong investigation into the University of California, Los Angeles’ medical school and concluded that the public institution was discriminating based on race by giving Black and Hispanic applicants a leg up in the admissions process. UCLA pushed back against claims it was violating the law. 

Since then, the DOJ has produced similar findings against four other medical schools and one law school, alleging that they are violating the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions.

In June of this year the DOJ announced it was opening 15 more probes into medical school admissions, though it didn't name the schools under investigation.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced today that it opened fifteen new investigations into potential race discrimination in medical school admissions. The Division recently announced its findings that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and Yale University both illegally used race in medical school admissions.

But despite all of this effort, it seems many schools are more committed to equity practices than they are to following the law. In short, they are still cheating. 

Today, Edward Blum, one of the people behind the SFFA case against Harvard has an opinion piece in the Post recommending a solution for this problem. It's the same solution any good teacher would take toward students who are cheating. Make them show their work.

What appears to be happening is that schools are continuing to pursue racial outcomes through racial proxies, such as race-targeted recruiting and essay prompts that solicit reflections on “identity.” Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, Yale, Princeton and Duke warned in a friend-of-the-court brief that they could not “obtain the diverse student body” that they said was “essential” without using racial preferences. Yet after the ruling, Yale’s Black and Hispanic enrollment rose. School administrators attributed the increase to “Landscape” — a tool created by the nonprofit College Board that rates applicants by their neighborhood and high school. College Board dropped Landscape in 2025 amid criticism that it worked as a proxy for race...

The remedy is mandatory public disclosure. To shed light on racial discrimination in admissions more broadly, every competitive institution that accepts federal funds should be required to report the racial and statistical profiles of its applicants, its admitted students and its matriculating classes. This would include standardized test scores, GPAs, family income, Pell Grant eligibility, AP coursework and other metrics, broken down by race and ethnicity.

The data from Duke and Berkeley became public only because of a federal compliance review. Universal disclosure would give students, parents, courts, scholars and journalists the same information that investigators found at Duke and Berkeley. In addition, regulators should treat racial proxies — such as racial-identity essays — as violations in their own right.

Making institutions show their work is exactly what the Trump administration has tried to do, but progressives must also believe this approach would work because 17 blue states have sued to block it. A judge in Massachusetts blocked the Trump administration's order.

...a group of Democratic attorneys general from 17 states sued in early March to block the data collection.

Massachusetts District Court Judge Dennis Saylor, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in a late Friday order the survey was created in a “rushed and chaotic manner” and problems with it are being “compounded” by the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the Education Department...

“This is not a merely technical issue,” Saylor wrote. The process “cannot be turned over to states and local communities; they have no authority … to conduct such surveys. Nor, for that matter, does any federal agency other than NCES.”...

But Saylor’s ruling was not a complete victory for the states, with the judge writing that the agency has the authority to collect the data it is seeking.

Saylor also said he saw no reason to restrict the department from using it to investigate potential discrimination, rejecting an argument by the states that Trump would use the data to punish colleges and could impose severe penalties such as the loss of federal funding.

So this injunction may not last but it has tied up this effort in court for months already.

The Supreme Court's 2023 ruling was pretty clear and yet it seems some schools are doing their best to sidestep it. And that approach gets more widespread the further you get from the specific issues raised in the 2023 decision. Today we learned about another case that will be heading to the Court soon. This one involves admissions to some elite middle schools in Maryland.

The US Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a lawsuit against a Maryland county's lottery admissions policy for four elite public middle schools that some parents claim unlawfully discriminates against Asian American applicants...

The parents sued to challenge the entrance policies for the county's academically rigorous "magnet" schools, which provide enrichment programs in math and science, or the humanities, for high-achieving students in sixth through eighth grades. They include Takoma Park Middle School in Silver Spring and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Germantown.

The case represents the latest legal attack on entrance policies at certain highly selective public schools that challengers critique for continuing to pursue "racial balancing" with the aim of boosting diversity...

Plaintiffs in these new legal challenges claim that admissions to these prestigious programs, though race-neutral on the surface, use proxies such as socioeconomic status to achieve the same unlawful, race-based result in pursuit of diversity.

Admission to selective schools should be based on academic merit and achievement, not on race. But that's not something progressives believe. They are going to have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into treating students based on their scores rather than their skin color.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.

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