The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division dropped the receipts on Tuesday. UCSF School of Medicine, one of the most celebrated medical schools in the country, was running an admissions regime in which a Black applicant’s chance of admission was 12.6 times that of a White applicant with identical MCAT scores, identical undergraduate grade-point averages, and identical socioeconomic characteristics — and a Hispanic applicant’s was 4.6 times that of the same White peer. Those aren’t estimates. Those are the figures the department pulled out of UCSF’s own admissions files for the 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes.
This wasn’t a clerical issue. The federal investigation showed that UCSF’s application process asked candidates to identify their race at the first two stages, then funneled Black and Hispanic applicants into the final interview stage at higher rates than White and Asian applicants with stronger academic records. Race wasn’t a tiebreaker. Race was the door.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said it straight: “MCAT scores and undergraduate GPAs have taken a backseat to race at UCSF Medical School. Aspiring doctors should be admitted based on their qualifications.” That’s the right rule. The Supreme Court told the country in 2023, when it struck down race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, that race cannot be used the way UCSF used it. The record here documents that the Trump administration opened its investigation after President Trump’s January 21, 2025, executive order and found that UCSF’s admissions practices violated the department’s understanding of the Court’s ruling.
The probe opened on March 30, the result of an executive order President Trump signed on his second day back in office — January 21, 2025 — directing the attorney general to issue compliance guidance to federally funded schools. UCSF has until October 2 to contact the department and start discussing a voluntary resolution. There is no scenario in which UCSF talks its way out of this with a diversity statement.
This is the fourth major elite institution the Justice Department has caught running the same race-based scheme. UC San Diego’s medical school was found to have done the same thing earlier this summer, and the department has since opened investigations into fifteen medical schools across the country. Yale’s medical school followed. UC Berkeley’s law school was found to have violated civil-rights law in its 2024-25 admissions cycle. The pattern is not regional. It is not accidental. Elite American higher education built a system out of rejecting White and Asian applicants in the name of “diversity,” and the receipts are surfacing one school at a time.
UCSF can complain about federal overreach. It can call the findings a political stunt. It can roll out the diversity consultants and the faculty letters to the editor. None of it will change what the numbers say. The school built a system that picked winners by skin color, and the Justice Department has now put the ratio on the public record. If UCSF wants to keep training the country’s doctors, it will admit the next class the way the Supreme Court told it to — by the qualifications on the page, not the box the applicant checked.