The Justice Department says the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine violated federal civil-rights law by using race to decide who advanced through admissions and who ultimately received an acceptance letter.
The numbers uncovered by investigators are staggering.
When applicants had the same academic and socioeconomic backgrounds, DOJ found UCSF was 4.6 times more likely to admit Hispanic applicants and 12.6 times more likely to admit black applicants than white applicants.
The disparity is far beyond a close call around the margins. It is the government’s formal finding after reviewing three incoming classes.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon put the central numbers in public view Tuesday.
The Justice Department says its Civil Rights Division examined UCSF’s 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes and found that race affected decisions at all three stages of the application process: the primary application, the secondary application, and the interview.
Applicants were asked to identify and discuss their race. Fewer than 10 percent of secondary applications reached the interview stage, yet DOJ says black and Hispanic candidates were invited at much higher rates than white and Asian applicants even when their MCAT scores and undergraduate GPAs were lower.
The department concluded that UCSF admitted black and Hispanic applicants who academically underperformed the average rejected white and Asian candidate. It also found similarly elevated admission odds when black and Hispanic applicants were compared with Asian applicants.
Those findings strike at the heart of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which rejected race-based college admissions under federal law.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act bars institutions receiving federal money from discriminating on the basis of race. Medical schools receive substantial federal support, and they do not get to convert that support into a license for racial sorting.
Dhillon said MCAT scores and undergraduate GPAs had taken a back seat to race at UCSF. Her point was direct: aspiring doctors should be judged by their qualifications, not by “misguided and illegal notions of diversity.”
The raw 2025 admission rates offer another view of the imbalance.
DOJ’s findings letter says the department opened its investigation on March 30 and requested information about UCSF’s admissions practices. The school produced applicant data but, according to investigators, turned over only 83 other documents and many of those did not answer the government’s requests.
The letter says federal law forbids more than an explicit racial quota. It also prohibits using race against an applicant, relying on racial stereotypes, pursuing racial balancing, or hiding racial preferences behind vague diversity goals with no meaningful endpoint.
This is where the usual word games collapse.
A school cannot claim every applicant received an “individualized review” if race materially changed who reached the next stage and who was admitted. Calling the process holistic does not make discrimination legal.
The effect is especially serious at a medical school. Admission is the gate to one of the most demanding and consequential professions in America.
The public has every right to expect that future doctors were selected under a process centered on preparation, judgment, work, and merit.
The case also exposes the people erased by race-based admissions rhetoric. White and Asian applicants are students who spent years earning grades, preparing for the MCAT, and building clinical experience.
They were competing for a limited number of seats under rules that federal investigators say were tilted by race.
Equal protection does not become optional when the discrimination is wrapped in fashionable language.
The finding quickly drew attention to the sheer size of the disparity.
The Los Angeles Times reports that UCSF disputes DOJ’s conclusion and says its process complies with the law. The school argues that grades, coursework, and MCAT scores remain central but are considered alongside clinical experience, research, service, leadership, and other experiences.
The newspaper also reports that DOJ gave UCSF until October 2 to say whether it will pursue a voluntary agreement. The department says it will sue if settlement talks fail.
UCSF receives nearly $1 billion in federal funding each year, including $824 million from the National Institutes of Health in 2025. The notice focuses on settlement and possible litigation; the school’s Title VI obligations flow directly from that federal support.
The Times places the finding inside a broader Trump administration review of University of California admissions. DOJ has issued similar findings involving UC Berkeley’s law school and the medical schools at UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Davis; those campuses also dispute the government’s conclusions.
UCSF’s response deserves to be reported. It still must answer the government’s statistical findings and the allegation that race influenced all three admissions stages.
The Trump administration should follow through.
The Supreme Court drew the legal line in 2023, and Congress drew it decades earlier in the Civil Rights Act.
Public institutions cannot treat race as a trump card and then ask Americans to pretend the result is equality.
Every applicant deserves one standard, and every patient deserves confidence that medical schools chose their future doctors fairly.
Every federally funded university should understand that the law applies even when administrators dislike it.
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