The Trump administration is conducting a far-reaching investigation into whether Yale University’s admissions practices violate anti-discrimination laws, prompting one of the country’s most elite schools to pursue settlement talks with the government, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The Justice Department last month accused Yale’s medical school of giving illegal preferential treatment to Black and Hispanic applicants. But the department’s review is reaching beyond the medical school, the people said, encompassing undergraduate and law school admissions as well.

The expansive inquiry demonstrates the aggressive approach the Trump administration is taking to enforce its interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling that effectively banned race-conscious admissions three years ago. It shows the administration’s intensifying focus on admissions and represents a new front against Yale, which has largely been spared in the White House’s effort to punish elite colleges and reshape academia.

Yale’s quick moves to try to reach an agreement with the government suggest it does not want a high-profile, drawn-out fight similar to the one involving Harvard University. The status of a potential agreement was unclear on Friday, but Yale recently offered a proposal to the government, according to the three people briefed on the matter. The people, who have ties to the Trump administration or to Yale, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

On Friday, Yale referred to a statement it issued last month that said its medical school was “confident in the rigorous admissions process” and admitted students showed “exceptional academic achievement and personal commitment.” The Justice Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The administration has said nothing publicly about its evidence against Yale beyond a six-page letter it released in May. The letter included a summary of a Justice Department analysis of testing data and a reference to an internal presentation that officials believed might indicate Yale’s lingering focus on diversity in admissions.

President Trump’s pressure campaign against elite universities has gone months since its last headline-making settlement. And while a deal could alleviate federal pressure on Yale, it could create problems closer to campus. Schools that have signed agreements with the Trump administration have faced backlash from students, faculty and alumni who accused them of capitulating to Mr. Trump.

Last year, the administration reached agreements with a handful of elite schools, usually after it had moved to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding. The administration has not pursued the same approach with Yale and is instead relying on the threat of litigation against the university.

Yale has turned to McGuireWoods, a law firm that the University of Virginia used last year to negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department that included no financial penalties.

The Virginia agreement, which followed a Justice Department crusade to oust that university’s president, reflected the Trump administration’s disdain for universities’ efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion and its anger over how many schools have responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2023.

In that decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that an applicant “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” though he said that the opinion should not be “construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”

Pointing to Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion, many schools believe they can consider race among other factors in the context of admissions essays or interviews. But the administration has interpreted the court’s ruling to mean that schools may not consider race in any way.

Although the federal government’s scrutiny of Yale’s undergraduate and law school admissions practices has been conducted in secret — and has not yet resulted in formal, public findings — the Justice Department said in May that it believed that Yale’s medical school had for years violated civil rights law by “discriminating on the basis of race” in admissions.

The department added that it had concluded that Yale “continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race after the Supreme Court’s decision,” and it accused Yale of discriminating against white and Asian students to favor Black and Hispanic people.

The department said it had reviewed testing data and found that a Black applicant was far more likely to receive a medical school admissions interview than a similarly qualified Asian candidate. It also cited a presentation slide that it said “suggests that admissions personnel are given verbal instructions during this presentation encouraging the use of race/ethnicity in admissions, and such instructions are not put in writing.”

Although Yale in May expressed confidence in its approach, officials have nevertheless been looking to reach a settlement encompassing the medical school inquiry and the reviews into law and undergraduate admissions.

In its May letter about the medical school, the Justice Department told an outside lawyer for Yale that it wanted to reach “a voluntary resolution agreement with the university to ensure that admissions practices are brought into legal compliance.”

Yale was a Justice Department target during Mr. Trump’s first term. In 2020, before the Supreme Court ruling, the department sued the university, accusing it of discriminating against white and Asian applicants in undergraduate admissions. Yale disputed the department’s assessment, and the Biden administration later dropped the case.

At least in public, Yale has been something of an outlier among elite institutions in its relationship with the second Trump administration. It did not attract the type of research funding cuts that the administration used to pressure Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Pennsylvania into settlements last year.

Yale also did not draw the scorn or litigation that the administration has directed toward Harvard or the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which have rebuffed Washington’s demands that they pay at least hundreds of millions of dollars to the federal government. After suing the government, Harvard nearly reached a settlement with the administration last summer, only for talks to stall in the months after some administration figures argued the proposed terms were too generous to the university.

Until the medical school inquiry came into view in May, the administration had only sporadically spoken about Yale, leaving academic leaders across the country quietly debating why one of the country’s top universities had been spared the White House’s wrath.

In March 2025, for instance, the Education Department identified Yale as one of 60 colleges or universities that it had warned of “potential enforcement actions” if it concluded a school had responded inadequately to antisemitism.

But the next month, an administration task force on antisemitism said publicly that it had been “cautiously encouraged by Yale’s actions” in response to a campus protest.

According to The Yale Daily News, the university’s president, Maurie McInnis, said in October that there was “no obvious answer” to explain the government’s approach to Yale, though she openly wondered whether the university’s record on discourse had helped.

“Whether it is that long tradition, the long tradition we have of encouraging open debate from something like Yale Political Union or the Buckley Institute, or whether it’s we’re at the end of the alphabet, I don’t have that answer,” Dr. McInnis said, according to the newspaper.

But Yale has also tried to make inroads in Washington and with its critics. It poured money into lobbying, for instance, and Dr. McInnis has often been in touch with administration officials like Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who spoke at Yale in April.

A day before the speech, a Yale task force published a report that excoriated top colleges and universities for rising mistrust in higher education, a self-examination that delighted many on the right.

That report, prepared by 10 Yale professors, covered a range of ills in higher education, but it argued that the holistic admissions process was “subjective and hard to explain.” It went on to warn that “when selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process.”

By that point, though, the Justice Department’s review had been underway for about a year.

And a few months had passed since Dr. McInnis virtually presented Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, with an award tied to his resistance to Trump administration pressure.