The University of California, San Diego has become the third school in the UC system accused by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), under the Trump administration, of running an illegal, race-based admissions process — this time at its highly ranked School of Medicine.
In a letter sent Monday, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told UC San Diego that a Justice Department compliance review, opened in March in coordination with the Department of Education, had concluded that the medical school “intentionally discriminated against applicants by granting and denying admission based on their race” even after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned race-conscious admissions nationwide.
The letter lays out the department’s case in granular detail. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, DOJ says, San Diego Med sorted applicants into three tiers by MCAT score and GPA, but let students with lower scores skip into a more favorable tier if they were considered “underrepresented minorities in medicine” — a category the school’s own materials defined as including Black and Hispanic students but not white or Asian ones. After the ruling, the department alleges, the school kept the same basic sorting system but swapped in a new label — “hardship” — as a stand-in for race. Internal emails cited in the letter show the school’s admissions director recommending in July 2023 that the school “purposely select” additional students from a lower-scoring tier specifically to boost the number of underrepresented minority applicants getting interviews.
The department backs its findings with admissions data covering 2019 through 2025. According to the letter, Black applicants were admitted at more than double the rate of white applicants in each of the past three admissions cycles, even though Black and Hispanic admitted students had consistently lower median MCAT scores and GPAs than their white and Asian counterparts. In the 2025 incoming class, for instance, the letter states that Black and Hispanic admitted students had a median MCAT score at the 79th percentile, compared with the 92nd percentile for white students and 96th for Asian students.
The DOJ says it is seeking a voluntary resolution agreement with UC San Diego and will sue if those talks fail.
UC San Diego has not yet publicly responded to the specific findings in Monday’s letter. In response to the initial Reuters report on the investigation, the university said it was reviewing the DOJ’s communication, remained “committed to following federal law,” and said its admissions requirements “must meet strict academic thresholds, a requirement that is and was applied uniformly to all applicants.” The medical school’s admissions website states it “does not consider race or ethnicity as criteria for selection.”
Monday’s letter is part of a broader the DOJ’s campaign against diversity practices in higher education under President Trump, who has described such policies as discriminatory against white people and men. The department has already made similar findings against the medical schools at UC Los Angeles and Yale, and said in June it had opened civil rights investigations into 15 medical schools nationwide. Critics of the administration’s approach, including civil rights advocates, argue diversity practices help address longstanding inequities facing marginalized groups, and that the wider crackdown on universities — which has also touched pro-Palestinian campus protests, transgender policies and climate programs — threatens academic freedom and due process.
