Key Points
- The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division found that UC San Diego School of Medicine intentionally discriminated against white and Asian applicants in favor of Black and Hispanic applicants, violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court's 2023 SFFA decision.
- DOJ data analysis shows Black applicants were admitted at more than double the rate of white applicants for the incoming classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025.
- The Department is seeking a voluntary resolution agreement with the university and says it will file suit if negotiations fail.
The Justice Department has found that the University of California San Diego School of Medicine used race in its admissions process in violation of federal civil rights law, according to a findings letter announced by the DOJ and sent to the university on July 20, 2026.
The Civil Rights Division opened its compliance review on March 25, 2026, under an agreement with the Department of Education, examining whether the medical school's admissions practices comply with Title VI and the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (PDF File), which banned race-conscious admissions in higher education.
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What The DOJ Says
According to the letter, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, the school used "hardship" application questions as a proxy for race after SFFA. Admissions staff sorted applicants into three groups by MCAT score and GPA, then split each group into "hardship" subgroups (six categories in all) before rating batches of 30 applicants for interviews. In the 2023-24 and 2024-25 cycles, reviewers had access to applicants' race during this stage.
Internal documents cited in the letter show the school's director of admissions proposed in June 2023 (days before the SFFA decision) to "purposely select some students from Group C," the lowest-scoring tier, because roughly 550 underrepresented minority students fell out of the middle tier under race-neutral criteria.
The Numbers
The DOJ's analysis of applicant-level data found admission rates for Black applicants were more than double those for white applicants three years running: 6.18% versus 2.45% for the 2023 incoming class, 5.25% versus 2.1% in 2024, and 5.14% versus 1.96% in 2025.
For the 2025 incoming class, Black and Hispanic admitted students had a median MCAT score of 510 (79th percentile), compared with 516 (92nd percentile) for white admittees and 519 (96th percentile) for Asian admittees — a gap the DOJ says widened after SFFA.
The Department also noted the school produced only 75 documents in response to its requests and offered no explanation for the score disparities. The letter concludes the discrimination covered the 2022-23 through 2024-25 admissions cycles and is "likely ongoing."
How This Connects
This is the second University of California medical school to face a DOJ discrimination finding in two months. In June 2026, the Department found UC Davis School of Medicine violated Title VI through its "Davis Scale" socioeconomic scoring system, where underrepresented enrollment rose from 24% in 2011 to 58% in 2023 and Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted at rates up to six times higher than white and Asian applicants with stronger metrics. The DOJ has also alleged Yale's medical school discriminated by race through 2025, signaling that post-SFFA enforcement against medical schools is accelerating, not slowing down.
The admissions scrutiny lands as the financial picture for future doctors shifts too: Grad PLUS loans end in 2026, and new professional student loan caps will limit federal borrowing for medical students, pushing more applicants toward private medical school loans to cover the gap.
The DOJ is seeking a voluntary resolution agreement to bring the school's admissions practices into compliance with Title VI. If those negotiations fail, the Department says it will sue. UC San Diego receives substantial federal funding, including nine active Department of Education grants totaling roughly $14.6 million, which gives the government leverage under Title VI.
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Editor: Colin Graves
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