DOJ says UC San Diego medical school illegally used race in admissions

School used ‘hardship’ questions as racial proxy, DOJ says

The U.S. Department of Justice said Monday that the University of California San Diego School of Medicine unlawfully used race in its admissions process, favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over their white and Asian counterparts.

The DOJ said the school manipulated applicant data to achieve greater racial diversity. According to the department’s findings made public Monday, admissions officers used applicants’ written responses to questions about overcoming “hardships” to create subgroups within categories based on MCAT scores and GPAs, a system the department alleged functioned as a “racial proxy” to increase the diversity of the student body.

“San Diego Med’s documents show that admissions staff used purportedly ‘race-neutral’ subjective criteria to deliberately increase admission of so-called ‘underrepresented minorities in medicine,’ which includes Black and Hispanic applicants,” the DOJ said in a statement.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement, “San Diego Med’s blatant efforts to prioritize race are illegal, and we will end these practices.”

The DOJ pointed to 2025 admissions data showing that 5.14% of Black applicants were admitted compared with nearly 2% of white applicants. “The applicant-level data produced by San Diego Med also indicated that a Black or Hispanic student had a substantially higher likelihood of being admitted than a White or Asian student with the same academic credentials,” the department said in a letter to the school.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said the admissions process violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, and the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina — a ruling the Trump administration has interpreted to ban the use of race in higher education admissions.

The announcement Monday comes a month after the DOJ announced similar findings at UC Davis. The department has also previously found that medical schools at UCLA and Yale University illegally considered race in admissions, as MSI previously reported. On June 4, the department announced investigations into 15 medical schools over alleged race discrimination in admissions.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 21, 2025, directing the Justice Department and the Department of Education to issue guidance to federally funded educational institutions on complying with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling. Diversity, equity and inclusion policies have been a target of Trump, who has sought to eliminate what his administration describes as illegal DEI practices from public and private spaces, including institutions of higher education.