The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced this week that George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences intentionally discriminated based on race when selecting its 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. It is the second medical school the department has found in violation this summer, following its June finding against UC Davis School of Medicine.
According to the DOJ, GW Med told applicants after the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions ruling that it would no longer consider race from application check-boxes. Investigators say the school then used essay prompts designed to draw out applicants’ racial or ethnic identity and relied on that information to decide who got interviews.
The DOJ says the practice violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the same statute behind the Education Department’s warnings to 60 schools earlier in the administration.
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Why It Matters
Medical school is among the most expensive degrees a student can pursue, and admission rates are low. When the government alleges a school rejected applicants with stronger credentials on the basis of race, it goes to the fairness of a process that determines who gets to become a doctor.
What DOJ Says It Found
The department’s findings track the MCAT-based comparisons it made at UC Davis:
- Black applicants were selected for interviews at significantly higher rates, and received higher interview scores, than Asian applicants with similar qualifications.
- Admitted Black students in 2024 and 2025 had substantially lower MCAT scores than admitted White or Asian students.
- The school regularly rejected White and Asian applicants with stronger credentials in favor of Black and Hispanic applicants with weaker ones.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said the practices “reveal an intent to prioritize racial diversity over merit.”
GW disputes the finding. In a statement reported by WJLA, the university said it is “disappointed by the DOJ’s conclusions, which we believe are incorrect” and that its admissions process “fully complies with the law.”
The DOJ has not released the underlying data, so what it describes can’t be independently verified yet. That’s a change from the UC Davis case, where the schools’ own words about “class-based affirmative action” were the issue.
How This Connects
This is the latest school the DOJ has taken issue with. In the UC Davis case, the DOJ said the share of “underrepresented in medicine” students climbed from 24% in 2011 to 58% in 2023 and that Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted at rates up to six times higher than White and Asian applicants with stronger metrics.
UC Davis used a socioeconomic scoring tool while GW allegedly used essay prompts. The latest allegations signal that any workaround to the 2023 ruling is fair game to go after, even as courts have pushed back on some of its other higher-ed enforcement.
DOJ says it will open settlement talks with GW and sue if those fail, the same path it laid out for UC Davis. The department also said it is continuing to investigate other medical schools for Title VI compliance, so more findings are likely.
Editor: Colin Graves
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