Dozens of elite colleges and universities are facing accusations that they found a backdoor way around the Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action in admissions by relying on an outside organization.
The Equal Protection Project alleges that 30 prominent schools recruit minority applicants through a “racially discriminatory pre-screened pool” operated by the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers (IRT) Consortium, a program designed to promote 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 recruit from a pool of applicants that 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, alleging that the 30 IRT Consortium member schools violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law prohibits federally funded schools from engaging in racial discrimination.
Founded in Andover, Mass., in 1990, the IRT Consortium was created to increase diversity in K-12 education and higher education. The number of participating schools has changed over the years.
In 2023, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that using race-based admissions standards violates 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 consortium’s mission statement says it supports underserved and underrepresented future educators, while its application asks candidates to write an essay on “diversity advocacy.”
In its complaint, the Equal Protection Project cited IRT data showing that more than “90% of its participants in the 2026 cohort identify as people of color.”
“We believe that this warrants a full investigation,” Jacobson said. “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 said the circumstances justify investigating the schools, describing their “mere fact that they’re participating” in the IRT Consortium as “troubling.”
He founded the Equal Protection Project in 2023 as an advocacy organization focused on identifying and challenging race-based affirmative action practices.
Jacobson said the group has challenged roughly 900 programs since its launch and has already prevailed in about 350 cases.
“We were successful even under the Biden administration, but we’re seeing, I think, greater success now under the [Trump] administration,” he said.
“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.”
The schools named in 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.
The complaint also names 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 schools named in the complaint and the IRT Consortium for comment.
“Our philosophy is that race or ethnicity should never be a factor in educational opportunities,” Jacobson said. “We do not accept that the answer for past racism is more racism.”