UCLA Med School Accused of Racial Discrimination in Admissions

The medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, allegedly gave preference to Black and Hispanic applicants over the last three admissions cycles, in violation of federal law and a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department said Wednesday as it released the results of a yearlong investigation into the institution.

The findings, outlined in a seven-page letter, mark the first time that the Justice Department has publicly claimed that a university discriminated based on race during the admissions process. But the Trump administration has opened a number of investigations into the issue as part of its ramped-up enforcement of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which banned race-conscious admissions policies. As part of its campaign to suss out whether colleges are continuing to use race in their admissions processes, the administration also is demanding years’ worth of application and admissions data from colleges.

“UCLA’s admissions process has been focused on racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence—allowing racial politics to distract the school from the vital work of training great doctors,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in the release. “Racism in admissions is both illegal and anti-American, and this department will not allow it to continue.”

Admissions experts have argued that the Trump administration’s interpretation of the court’s ruling, as articulated in anti-DEI guidance the DOJ released last year, goes well beyond the intentions of the court.

“They probably have their vision of what they think compliance with SFFA is, but that’s not what SFFA actually says,” said Julie Park, a professor of education at the University of Maryland and a leading admissions researcher.

The Justice Department wrote in its letter to UCLA that it is aiming to voluntarily resolve the investigation “to ensure that admissions practices are brought into legal compliance.” The letter didn’t say exactly what that would entail.

Students for Fair Admissions and other groups sued the medical school last year, accusing it of discriminating against applicants based on race. The Justice Department joined that lawsuit earlier this year.

The admissions investigation is separate from the agency’s other investigations into UCLA and the broader UC system. DOJ found last summer that UCLA had created a hostile environment for Jewish students.

A UCLA medical school spokesperson said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that its admission process is “grounded in a rigorous, comprehensive review of each applicant.”

“We are confident in our practices and our mission to maintain access to a high-quality education to all qualified students,” the spokesperson said. “We are carefully reviewing the Department of Justice’s report. The David Geffen School of Medicine is committed to providing equal opportunity to all applicants and fully complying with federal and state laws.”

What DOJ Found

To support its findings, the Justice Department cited data showing that Black and Hispanic students admitted to the medical school had lower grade point averages and MCAT scores compared to white and Asian applicants. Lawyers for the agency also said that the medical school’s “internal policies, publicly distributed literature, and email correspondence of its leadership, consistently and emphatically demonstrate [the school’s] intent to use race in admissions decisions despite the [Supreme Court] ruling.” (The UC system has been banned from considering race in admissions since 1996, when California passed a referendum making the practice illegal at public institutions.)

As an example, DOJ lawyers pointed to resources that medical school admissions administrators shared including tips to achieve diversity goals and potential workarounds to the Supreme Court decision.

“Such workarounds include racial proxies and emphasizing ‘holistic review practices’ as bases for admitting students,” the DOJ letter stated. “Discrimination on the basis of racial proxies is offensive to our nation’s Constitution and laws, just as direct racial discrimination is.”

Holistic college admissions—the use of factors beyond test scores and grades—has been the norm for a century, and higher education leaders broadly agree that the practice is important for creating a dynamic student body and campus environment. The Trump administration has stated in its guidance that factors like geographic location or application materials related to “lived experience” or “overcoming obstacles” can be used as proxies for race. But the administration’s criteria for when they are considered proxies and when they aren’t are unclear.

Park said that the administration’s vision of compliance would likely consist of only admitting students with the highest MCAT scores and GPAs.

“They’re claiming UCLA was using these racial proxies when, in fact, I don’t see evidence of that,” she said. “There are all sorts of reasons medical schools will want to draw from a wide range of geographic regions.”

DOJ lawyers also took issue with resources shared by the administrators showing how increasing the diversity of the health-care workforce will improve health-care outcomes for Black and Hispanic patients. A DOJ release called this a “dubious connection,” but one UCLA study found that Hispanic patients fared better when treated by a Hispanic doctor. Likewise, a clinical trial at Stanford University found that Black men sought more preventive services when they were seen by Black doctors.

For “statistical evidence of intentional discrimination,” the DOJ used GPA and test score data for the classes enrolling in the fall of 2023, 2024 and 2025. In 2023, Black and Hispanic students’ median MCAT scores fell in the 68th percentile, while all other demographic groups scored in the 86th percentile or higher. In 2024, Black students scored in the 72nd percentile while Hispanic students fell in the 66th percentile. Once again, the other demographic groups’ median scores were in the 86th percentile or higher. DOJ lawyers wrote in the letter that data for the class starting in 2025 showed similar disparities, though the specific numbers weren’t included.

The UCLA medical school has said that MCAT scores and GPAs are just some factors that it considers as part of its holistic approach to admissions. But DOJ lawyers argue that the holistic approach “does not explain the major disparities it has produced in objective academic metrics between racial groups.” Instead, DOJ lawyers say the gaps in MCAT scores and GPAs show that the university relied “on a stereotyped assumption that Black and Hispanic students disproportionately excel in these nonacademic metrics.”

James Murphy, a senior fellow with Class Action, a higher education advocacy organization, said that he found the evidence against UCLA “really weak,” noting that the letter to the institution includes few references to institutional documents or interviews with UCLA employees and students, both of which he said are common in civil rights investigations. The test score data is also focused on just the incoming class rather than considering students who were admitted but ended up studying elsewhere.

“Without analysis of the applicant pool and the yield—where the students they admitted ended up going—they failed to understand pretty fundamental and really important aspects of who is enrolled in a class,” Murphy said, calling the finding “a case of absolute gross government overreach.”