DOJ says UCLA med school favored Black, Hispanic applicants over Asian, white students

The David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, violated federal law by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over white and Asian American applicants in its admissions process, the Justice Department announced last Wednesday.

The finding, released after a yearlong investigation by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, represents the department’s first public declaration of race-based admissions discrimination at a university since the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions policies in its 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. DOJ lawyers said the school leadership’s communications, policies and published materials demonstrated a deliberate effort to factor race into admissions decisions despite that ruling and California’s Proposition 209, which passed in 1996, banning race preferences at public universities.

To support its case, the department cited an application document used in 2024 and 2025 that invited students to volunteer whether they belonged to a marginalized group, as well as MCAT and GPA data across the fall 2023, 2024 and 2025 entering classes. The data showed that Black and Hispanic students consistently scored lower than white and Asian applicants. In 2023, their median MCAT scores fell in the 68th percentile, while all other demographic groups scored in the 86th percentile or higher.

In response, UCLA’s medical school said its admissions process is “grounded in a rigorous, comprehensive review of each applicant” and that it is carefully reviewing the DOJ’s findings. It added that it is committed to fully complying with federal and state laws and is confident in its mission to maintain access to a high-quality education for all qualified students.

The dispute over the medical school’s admissions practices has implications beyond campus. For Asian American communities, the case has been a focal point since SFFA filed a lawsuit against the school last May alongside nonprofit Do No Harm, accusing it of disadvantaging Asian American and white applicants. The DOJ joined that suit earlier this year.

UCLA now faces a choice between reaching a voluntary agreement with the department or contesting its findings, with potential legal action and a loss of federal funding at stake. As we previously reported, Asian American enrollment at Johns Hopkins surged from 25.6% to 45.1% between 2023 and 2025 after the Supreme Court ruling took effect, though Asian enrollment declined at Duke, Princeton and Yale over the same period.

These uneven results underscore that the ruling’s effects remain far from settled, even as the UCLA case pushes that reckoning into graduate and professional education.