The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division just wrapped up a massive, year-long deep dive into how the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA picks its students, and the findings are sending shockwaves through the academic world.
According to federal investigators, the university didn’t just consider race—they intentionally built their classes around it, systematically bypassing more qualified candidates to hit specific demographic targets.
The investigation uncovered internal documents showing that UCLA leadership operated under the belief that patients fare better when treated by doctors of their own race. To achieve this “racial matching,” the school reportedly pushed aside traditional standards of merit.
Data gathered during the probe revealed a stark gap in academic credentials: on average, admitted Black and Hispanic applicants had consistently lower scores and qualifications than the White and Asian students who were accepted alongside them.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, didn’t pull any punches when announcing the findings.
“UCLA’s admissions process has been focused on racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence — allowing racial politics to distract the school from the vital work of training great doctors,” Dhillon said. She further characterized the practice as “illegal and anti-American,” vowing that the Department of Justice would shut down such programs.
The legal hammer falling on UCLA follows recent Supreme Court precedents that strictly forbid race-based discrimination in higher education. Bill Essayli, the First Assistant United States Attorney for the Central District of California, called the school’s behavior “abhorrent to our Constitution.”
He emphasized that “race discrimination has no place in our nation’s institutions of higher learning,” noting that the pattern of conduct discovered at the medical school was a direct violation of federal law.
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Because medical schools like UCLA rely heavily on federal taxpayer dollars to fund their programs, they are bound by strict non-discrimination statutes.
The Department of Justice made it clear that this investigation is part of a broader, aggressive push to scrub “racial politics” out of medical school admissions across the country. For now, the focus remains on UCLA, where federal officials insist that the pursuit of “quality and excellence” must outweigh social engineering in the training of the nation’s future surgeons and physicians.
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