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.”
Before she became an SEO fellow, for example, Kristin Santana interned at the white-shoe law firm Simpson Thacher, worked full-time as a paralegal at the white-shoe law firm Davis Polk, and attended a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, Loomis Chaffee, whose alumni include the billionaire financier Henry Kravis and the fashion designer Jason Wu, and which costs between $60,000 and 80,000 a year. Makira Burns held full-time posts at the white-shoe law firms Latham & Watkins and Sidley Austin before SEO placed her at Debevoise & Plimpton. Iannelis Ramdhany Correa, a graduate of the elite Phillips Andover Academy, one of the top boarding schools in the country, which boasts George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and the NFL coach Bill Belichick as graduates, spent two years at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler prior to her placement at White & Case.
Another SEO fellow, Blake Bridge, is the son of two Tampa-area plastic surgeons, Donna and Peter Bridge, who were mentioned in a 2003 issue of the Brown Alumni Magazine. According to Salary Expert, plastic surgeons in Tampa make an average of $481,200 a year.
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.
“Rather than discovering overlooked talent, SEO concentrates opportunities among candidates who already possess necessary credentials, existing law-firm connections, and access to elite professional networks,” Americans for Equal Opportunity wrote in a letter to the FTC. “The obvious lack of socioeconomic hardship and extensive professional networks enjoyed by many in the 2026 Fellowship class … suggest dishonest advertising by SEO.”
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.
“Black students at Yale Law School … are arguably the single most sought-after demographic cohort in elite law firms,” the letter reads. “Yet, SEO enrolls approximately 50% of these students. It is difficult to square this practice with SEO’s claims that participating students are ‘underserved’ or otherwise lack access to professional legal networks.”
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.
SEO did not respond to a request for comment.
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.
The 2026 class, which includes former consultants at Booz Allen Hamilton and the Boston Consulting Group, is also full of left-wing activists and Democratic operatives. Ara Omotowa, an incoming Stanford law student, served as Ibram X. Kendi’s research assistant while she was an undergraduate at Harvard, then joined the Biden Treasury Department as a “special assistant to the counselor for racial equity.” Alex Taylor, a Columbia University alumnus, won scholarships from the Truman and Obama foundations and interned for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). Henry Rosas, an incoming Columbia Law student, was the community action chair of the “Latinx Queer Affinity Group” at Yale University and a “Latino constituency organizing director” at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Other fellows did not work in Democratic politics but enjoyed the fruits of the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry. Niani Benjamin was a full-time “diversity and inclusion assistant” at the law firm Arnold & Porter before SEO placed her at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. Jasmine Sanchez researched “victim blaming” at New York University’s Social Justice Lab before interning for the popular YouTube star MrBeast, whose production company was sued for sexual harassment earlier this year.
None of the 2026 fellows appear to have worked for Republican politicians.
In recent years, SEO has downplayed its role as an engine for economic mobility. While the 2024 presentation mentioned “low-income, first-generation, and underserved individuals,” none of those terms appear on SEO’s website, which simply states that the fellowship “helps incoming law students thrive in law school and in corporate law firms.”
“Aspiring law students receive access to critical educational, career development, and internship opportunities that propel them to succeed in the legal profession,” the fellowship’s homepage says. “All are welcome to apply.”
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