Dozens of elite colleges and universities have been accused of finding a clever workaround to the Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action in admissions by using a third party.
The Equal Protection Project accused 30 top colleges and universities of recruiting minority students through a “racially discriminatory pre-screened pool” of applicants from the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) Consortium, which aims to boost diversity in education.
“There is inconsistent compliance with the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision nationally, not just limited to particular schools, and so this jumped out at us,” William Jacobson, president and founder of the Equal Protection Project, told The Post.
“What this consortium allows them to do is to recruit from a pool of applicants, which has already been screened for race and ethnicity.”
On Thursday, the Equal Protection Project filed a complaint with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, accusing the 30 member schools of the IRT Consortium of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars schools that get federal funds from racial discrimination.
The Andover, Mass.-based IRT Consortium was set up in 1990 with the goal of diversifying K-12 as well as higher education. The number of schools in the program has fluctuated over time.
But in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case that race-based admission standards violate Title VI and the Fourteenth Amendment.
“This is a scholarship; no university money is funding it,” Jacobson acknowledged. “That’s actually not a legal excuse.”
The group’s mission statement crows about how it empowers underserved and underrepresented future educators. Its application asks for an essay about “diversity advocacy.”
In its complaint, the Equal Protection Project pointed to data from IRT about how over “90% of its participants in the 2026 cohort identify as people of color.”
“We believe that this warrants a full investigation,” Jacobson went on. “We do not have access, obviously, to the internal workings of each of these schools to see whether they did, in fact, take race into account through this method.”
Jacobson contended that the facts warrant an investigation into the schools, calling the “mere fact that they’re participating” in the IRT Consortium “troubling.”
He founded the Equal Protection Project in 2023 as an advocacy group aimed at rooting out race-based affirmative action practices.
Since the group was launched, it has challenged some 900 programs and already achieved success in about 350 of them, according to Jacobson.
“We were successful even under the Biden administration, but we’re seeing, I think, greater success now under the [Trump] administration,” he explained.
“We only bring cases where we believe we have very strong evidence of a civil rights violation. We don’t challenge DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] programs just because they’re DEI. We only challenge them if we believe there’s a legal violation.”
Schools targeted by the complaint include Boston College, Brandeis University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Emory University, Harvard University, New York University, Purdue University, Princeton University, Rice University, Rutgers University, Stanford University, University of Arizona, and University of California, Berkeley.
It also includes: the University of California Davis, University of California San Diego, University of Connecticut, University of Kentucky, University of Maine, University of Maryland, College Park, University of New Hampshire, University of Notre Dame, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, University of Vermont, Washington State University, and Yale University.
The Post contacted the targeted schools and the IRT Consortium for comment.
“Our philosophy is that race or ethnicity should never be a factor in educational opportunities,” Jacobson explained. “We do not accept that the answer for past racism is more racism.”
