Affirmative Action at Yale

Ivy League schools have spent decades using Affirmative Action policies as a way to demographically engineer their student body. We previously covered Affirmative Action at Harvard and Medical Schools, and today will be focusing on what race preferences via Affirmative Action look like at Yale.

The above table quantifies race preferences within each academic decile; this is helpful because we can see the chances of admissions for individuals of each race who are comparably qualified within academic deciles and more or less qualified between academic deciles. We can start things off by visualizing the table data:

From looking at our first chart, we can see a general trend where Blacks and Hispanics tend to have higher chances of admission into Yale, while Asians and Whites are disadvantaged.

To see how wide the disparity is, we can zoom into the 10th academic decile representing the most qualified applicants:

As shown above, the chances of admission by race for applicants in the 10th academic decile are as follows:

• Black: 60%

• Hispanic: 34.8%

• White: 20.2%

• Asian: 14.3%

Even amongst the most qualified candidates, we are able to observe a clear disparity between different groups.

Black individuals have over 4x the chance of admission into Yale as Asian individuals and nearly 3x the chance as White individuals. We can also compare the raw numbers:

Relative to ‘Total Admissions’ representing all candidates in the 10th academic decile:

• Blacks have a +42.5% advantage

• Hispanics have a +17.4% advantage

• Whites have a +2.7% advantage

• Asians have a +3.1% disadvtange

A similar trend persists across other academic deciles:

The preferences benefiting Blacks and Hispanics are so strong that the most qualified Asian and White candidates have comparable chances of admission as Black and Hispanic candidates in lower deciles.

Hispanic candidates in the 6th decile have a higher chance of admission than the most qualified Asian and White candidates in the 10th decile.

Black candidates in the 5th academic decile still have a higher chance of admission than the most qualified Asian and White candidates in the 10th decile.

It is important to discuss Affirmative Action through the data we have available because it is one of the blatant forms of institutional racism in the United States. Universities should not be violating Civil Rights by discriminating against candidates on the basis of race.

If the United States wants to move towards a Colorblind Meritocracy than making sure our institutions end Affirmative Action programs is a key step along that path.

Appendix

Adding additional visuals of the Yale Affirmative Action Data in this section, in case they are of interest to anyone. I may periodically update this section with more charts.