Exclusive | 30 elite colleges and universities accused of bypassing Supreme Court block on affirmative action

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 b...