Wealth Not Race the Big Scandal in Elite College Admissions: The DOJ Gets it Wrong
TL;DR: 1) Yale’s racial profile of enrolled students is similar to not just all the other Ivy League schools but also those of the top 65 nationally-ranked colleges and universities in the United States. 2) Even if we were to factor out all Black admissions from Yale’s application process, the chances of acceptance for white and Asian applicants wouldn’t materially improve. 3) Racial discrimination isn’t the right question to be asking; the real story of disparity of access at elite colleges in America is economic. Those numbers are just astounding.
WHAT MADE THE NEWS
The U.S. Justice Department recently announced that after a two-year investigation of Yale University’s admission policies, it found that the Ivy League school illegally discriminates against White and Asian American applicants for undergraduate admission. The gist of the discrimination claim against Yale was made by Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for civil rights who asserted that for “the great majority” of cases, Asian American and White applicants have “only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials.” While this certainly sounds unfair, there are several problems with his claim.
