UC San Diego illegally uses race in admissions, Trump Justice Department alleges

UC San Diego’s medical school illegally used race in choosing which students to admit, discriminating against white and Asian applicants in favor of Black and Latino ones, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged Monday.

The findings follow a roughly four-month investigation by the DOJ and makes the University of California, San Diego the latest medical school targeted by the Trump administration in a widening effort to root out what it alleges are widespread race-based admissions, a campaign that has focused heavily on California universities.

It follows similar actions against Stanford, UCLA and UC Davis, and escalates a legal conflict that could cost the UC system hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding if the two sides cannot reach an agreement.

In the findings announced by its Civil Rights Division, the Justice Department said the medical school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars schools that receive federal money from discriminating based on race. The department said the school also went against the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on affirmative action, which barred colleges from considering race in admissions.

“Rather than rely on MCAT scores or GPA, San Diego Med’s shadow application process unlawfully judged applicants for admission based on their race,” Asst. Atty. Gen. Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement. “San Diego Med’s blatant efforts to prioritize race are illegal, and we will end these practices.”

The department said it wants to reach a voluntary agreement with the university to change its admissions practices, and said it will sue if those talks fail. Medical schools depend heavily on federal money. The National Institutes of Health, for example, awarded out about $427 million in federal research funds to UC San Diego last year.

A UC San Diego spokesperson said the university is reviewing the findings.

The medical school “is proud to produce some of the highest-performing physicians and researchers in the nation,” the spokesperson said, adding that all applicants to the medical program “must meet strict academic thresholds, a requirement that is and was applied uniformly to all applicants.”

The university “remains committed to full compliance with federal law” and “welcomes the opportunity to work collaboratively and constructively with the federal government to affirm that commitment.”

The department laid out its case in an eight-page letter sent Monday to the campus. It said the school leaned on how applicants answered “hardship” questions — which ask students how they overcame disadvantages — as a proxy for race. The letter alleged that admissions staff first ranked applicants by test scores and grades, then created “hardship” subgroups that steered more Black and Latino students into interviews.

In the 2023-24 and 2024-25 admissions cycles, UC San Diego admissions officials could see an applicant’s race while deciding whom to interview, the department said. The department quoted internal emails, shared by the school during the review, in which it said the director of admissions recommended selecting lower-scoring applicants to enroll more students from underrepresented groups.

In one June 2023 email cited in the letter, the director wrote that he would “recommend that we purposely select some students from Group C,” a lower-scoring tier, the DOJ said.

The department said its analysis of the school’s data showed the admission rate for Black applicants was more than double the rate for white applicants in three straight years. In the class that entered in 2023, it said, 6.18% of Black applicants were admitted, compared with 2.45% of white applicants.

Admitted Black and Latino students also had lower median scores on the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT, and lower grades than white and Asian students, the department said.

The San Diego finding is part of a series of Trump administration investigations into how universities pick their students. In March, the department said it was examining the medical schools at UC San Diego, Stanford and Ohio State, demanding seven years of admissions data. Stanford and Ohio State also denied wrongdoing at the time.

In January, the department joined a lawsuit accusing UCLA’s medical school of using a “systemically racist approach” that favored Black and Latino applicants. In May, it also said it found that UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine had intentionally used race in admissions for three years.

At the time, Dhillon called the school’s approach “focused on racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence.”

A UCLA spokesperson said its admissions are “based on merit” and that the school follows the law. In June, the department made a similar finding against UC Davis, which similarly disputed it.

Last August, the government demanded a $1.2-billion settlement from UCLA over several alleged violations, including the use of race in admissions, though a federal judge later blocked much of that proposal.