The University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) School of Medicine used race as a determining factor in admissions as far back as 2022, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation announced Monday.
Through the admissions process, white and Asian applicants were more likely to be denied compared to black and Hispanic applicants, violating federal law and a 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned race discrimination in higher education, the DOJ said.
In a letter sent to the school about the investigation, the Justice Department urged it to enter into an agreement to ensure the medical school’s admissions practices are brought into compliance.
UC San Diego sent an emailed statement to The Epoch Times saying it is reviewing the DOJ findings.
“All applicants to the school’s Doctor of Medicine program must meet strict academic thresholds, a requirement that is and was applied uniformly to all applicants,” the statement read. “UC San Diego remains committed to full compliance with federal law and welcomes the opportunity to work collaboratively and constructively with the federal government to affirm that commitment.”
UC San Diego also noted that it produces some of the highest-performing medical personnel in the nation with residency placement rates consistently meeting or exceeding national averages.
The DOJ, however, said the medical school manipulated its applicant data to achieve greater racial diversity in admissions, accepting lower-credentialed students over others based on race.
This was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, the DOJ said. The admissions process also went against the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that offered similar protections for higher education.
“Rather than rely on MCAT scores or GPA, San Diego Med’s shadow application process unlawfully judged applicants for admission based on their race,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said. “San Diego Med’s blatant efforts to prioritize race are illegal, and we will end these practices.”
According to the agency’s findings, documents from UC San Diego’s medical school showed admissions staff used subjective, “race-neutral” criteria to deliberately boost admissions of “underrepresented minorities in medicine,” which includes black and Hispanic students.
The DOJ continued, detailing how the process involves applicants answering a “hardship” question to detail how they overcame disadvantages to help admissions staff determine who are “underrepresented minorities in medicine.”
The UC San Diego medical school “uses ‘hardship’ questions on the medical school’s application as a proxy for race,” the Justice Department said.
Applicants are divided into six categories—groups A through C—from highest to lowest test scores and GPAs with “hardship” subgroups in each group. Then, each group and its subgroup, “Group A” plus “Group A with hardship,” were combined into batches of 30 and rated for the interview stage of the admissions process.
Only a certain number of applicants in each batch could be given a rating that guaranteed them an interview.
Admissions staff purposefully uses “hardship” subgroups and invites more applicants from Group C to interview more “underrepresented minorities in medicine” and thus bolster their admittance over more qualified candidates.
“The school added this designation to purposely increase lower credentialed ‘hardship’ applicants in admissions by de-emphasizing MCAT scores and GPAs and prioritizing non-objective criteria,” the DOJ’s findings said.
Applicant data from the school showed disparities in MCAT and GPA scores between racial groups of admitted students. Admission rates for black applicants were more than double that of white applicants for the past three years, the DOJ found.
In the incoming class of 2023, 2.45 percent of white applicants were admitted, and 6.18 percent of black applicants were admitted. For the 2024 class, 2.1 percent of white students were accepted, and 5.25 percent of black students were accepted. In the 2025 class, 1.96 percent of white applicants were admitted while 5.14 percent of black applicants were admitted.
“In each of these three years, the average GPA and MCAT scores for black admitted applicants were consistently significantly lower than the GPA and MCAT scores of the white and Asian admitted applicants they competed against,” the DOJ said.
