The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) argues that George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences (GW Med) broke federal civil rights law by weighing race in its admissions decisions for the 2024 and 2025 incoming classes, the latest development in the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against diversity efforts in higher education.
The department’s Civil Rights Division concluded that GW Med violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ran afoul of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down race-conscious admissions nationwide. According to the department’s findings, the medical school’s application included essay prompts that allowed admissions officers to infer applicants’ race even after the university had barred the use of self-reported racial data on checkbox fields. Officials allege that information was then used when selecting candidates for interviews.
The department reported that Black applicants were selected for interviews and received favorable interview scores at notably higher rates than comparable Asian applicants, and that Black students admitted in 2024 and 2025 had lower average MCAT scores than their white and Asian counterparts. The department also claims white and Asian applicants with stronger credentials were passed over in favor of Black and Hispanic applicants.
“GW Med’s admissions practices reveal an intent to prioritize racial diversity over merit, which is unlawful and poses legitimate public health consequences for the patients its future doctors will serve,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in the department’s announcement.
GW has firmly disputed the findings. University President Ellen Granberg told the campus community the school is “closely reviewing” the department’s letter but “firmly” believes its conclusions are wrong. “The University has been and remains steadfastly committed to non-discrimination and Title VI compliance while advancing our academic mission and pursuing excellence in preparing health care leaders,” she wrote, according to The GW Hatchet. A university spokesperson separately called the DOJ’s findings “incorrect” and said GW’s admissions process “fully complies with the law.”
The department said it is pursuing a settlement with GW and would sue if those talks collapse.
The case fits into a much larger pattern. Since taking office, the Trump administration has opened DEI-related investigations into more than 50 universities, and the Justice Department has separately accused Duke University’s law school and medical schools at UCLA, UC Davis, UC San Diego and Yale of similarly weighing race in admissions. In June, the department disclosed it was investigating 15 medical schools nationwide without naming them, leaving open the possibility GW was already under scrutiny before Thursday’s announcement.
The post-SFFA legal landscape treats any institutional effort to sustain racial diversity, even indirectly, as presumptively discriminatory. Critics of that framework — including many in higher education — argue that practices like GW’s resilience-rating system, which the university adopted after 2023 to consider how applicants overcame adversity, are attempts to preserve access for students from historically marginalized communities rather than to disadvantage anyone. Whether such measures function as an end-run around SFFA or as a legitimate, race-neutral proxy for opportunity and hardship is a question these federal investigations are now testing — and one that remains unresolved by the courts.
The GW investigation is separate from an earlier Justice Department finding, announced in August 2025, that the university acted with “deliberate indifference” toward antisemitism during 2024 pro-Palestinian campus protests. Together, the two cases reflect the administration’s expanding use of civil rights enforcement as a lever on university policy, from campus speech to admissions practices, with GW now facing scrutiny on both fronts.
