A DEI Fellowship Pledged to Recruit ‘Underserved’ Legal Talent. It Accepted Some of the Most Privileged Students in the Country.

In October 2023, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) held a meeting with some of the top law firms in the United States. For years, the nonprofit had operated a diversity fellowship that placed “underrepresented” law students at white-shoe firms the summer before their 1L year. With law firms abandoning similar programs in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions, SEO wanted to assure its partners that they could still participate in the fellowship without fear of legal action.

In a PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the group claimed that the SEO Law Fellowship had always been “open to applicants from all racial and ethnic backgrounds,” adding that some firms may have gotten the wrong idea from its use of the term “underrepresented.”

Going forward, SEO said, the fellowship would be framed in exclusively socioeconomic terms. A similar presentation in 2024 claimed that the program was designed to “support low-income, first-generation, and underserved individuals” by providing them with “industry exposure.”

Two years later, the fellowship has accepted almost zero white people. And according to a Free Beacon review of the latest SEO class, many fellows are the opposite of underserved.

The fellowship’s 2026 cohort includes graduates of elite boarding schools, consultants with six-figure salaries, and the son of a Brown-educated plastic surgeon. It also includes students who held multiple posts at top law firms before applying for the program, raising questions about their need for additional “industry exposure.”

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The Free Beacon used LinkedIn to identify 50 of the 58 students selected for the fellowship this year. Their profiles paint a picture of privilege and elite access at odds with SEO’s egalitarian marketing, which frames the program as a leg-up for disadvantaged students who might otherwise be overlooked by top firms.

The gap between rhetoric and reality has sparked calls for a federal probe. On Wednesday, the conservative nonprofit Americans for Equal Opportunity asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate SEO for “potential false advertising practices,” arguing that the group had misrepresented itself to sponsor firms in violation of consumer protection laws.

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SEO is already fending off a probe by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its alleged use of racial preferences. The fellowship’s latest class—which includes at least eight students at Yale Law School alone—shows how such preferences can entrench the privilege they were ostensibly designed to remedy, giving a boost to the wealthy and well-connected in the name of social justice.

The letter notes that SEO recruits heavily from elite law schools where students enjoy disproportionate access to top firms. In 2022, for example, the fellowship enrolled 50 percent of incoming black students at Yale Law School, a number that remained unchanged over the next four years, according to the letter.

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SEO also enrolled 57 percent of black women in Stanford Law School’s 2022 incoming class, and 100 percent of the “multiracial men” in Columbia’s. Though the organization highlighted those statistics in its 2024 presentation to sponsor firms, it did not include any data on the number of first-generation or low-income students, the ostensible target of the program.

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More than 90 percent of the fellowship’s 2025 class attended a top 14 law school, according to internal data obtained by the Free Beacon. Of the 104 fellows that year, there were 15 from Columbia, 14 from Harvard, 13 from Stanford, and 8 from Yale.

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