Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday accused the University of California, San Diego's medical school of discriminating against White and Asian applicants by giving unlawful advantages to Black and Hispanic applicants.
- The top-ranked, highly selective institution favored underrepresented minorities for admission "to tinker with the racial representation of its incoming classes," Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s civil rights division, alleged in a letter detailing the agency’s findings.
- The DOJ said it will sue the UC San Diego School of Medicine if it determines that the institution has failed to return to compliance following settlement negotiations — a threat the Trump administration is increasingly leveling against medical schools to further crack down on higher education.
Dive Insight:
The DOJ accused UC San Diego's medical school of violating Title VI, which bars discrimination based on race, color or national origin. Its admissions process used terms like "hardship," "disadvantage" and "distance traveled" as proxies for race in the admissions process, Dhillon alleged in Monday's letter.
Race-conscious admissions practices have been illegal in California since 1996. And the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing race-conscious admissions said colleges could “not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today." But the ruling did not prohibit colleges "from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected" their life.
UC San Diego medical applicants deemed to have overcome a "hardship" were sorted into separate groups as a means of ensuring that more underrepresented minorities received admissions interviews, Dhillon alleged. As a result, the school has admitted Black applicants at more than twice the rate it's accepted White applicants in recent years, according to the DOJ.
In 2025, just over 5.1% of Black applicants were admitted, despite having lower average GPAs and MCAT scores than the nearly 2% of White applicants the school accepted, the federal agency said.
Overall, UC San Diego accepts 2.3% of its medical school applicants, according to U.S. News and World Report.
The medical school did not immediately respond to questions Tuesday.
On its admissions website, it said it "does not consider race or ethnicity as criteria for selection," in compliance with state law.
UC San Diego instead evaluates medical school applicants based on their academic record, MCAT score, scholarship, extracurriculars, letters of recommendation and personal interviews. Admitted students "demonstrate intelligence, maturity, integrity, dedication to the ideal of service to society" and "are best suited for meeting our educational goals," it says on its website.
The medical school previously touted the diversity of its incoming classes on its admissions webpage.
In the incoming class of 2024 — the last to apply and be accepted before President Donald Trump returned to the White House — 32% of students were "underrepresented in medicine," which it did not define. In lieu of that statistic, the medical school shared the age range of the incoming class of 2025.
The UC system has been a frequent target of the Trump administration. The DOJ has now accused three of the University of California's six medical schools of using illegal admissions practices. Monday's findings against UC San Diego follow similar letters to the system's Los Angeles and Davis campuses.
Prior to Monday's announcement, the DOJ had not confirmed publicly that it was investigating UC San Diego's medical school. The New York Times reported on the probe in March, along with similarly unaddressed investigations into Ohio State University and Stanford University's medical schools.
