The Justice Department concluded that two University of California medical schools intentionally discriminated against applicants based on race, according to a report published by the Pacific Research Institute in 2025. Federal investigators found that UCLA and UC San Diego medical schools used racial proxies and workarounds to favor black and Hispanic applicants while discriminating against white and Asian candidates, violating both California's constitution and the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that banned race-based admissions. The report details how school officials concealed their practices through coded language and unwritten instructions to admissions committees.
At UCLA's medical school, Justice Department investigators discovered test scores for the incoming 2024 class showed substantial gaps across racial lines, with black and Hispanic students admitted with notably lower scores and GPAs than Asian and white applicants. The school's top admissions official distributed a document outlining "workarounds to achieve medical school 'diversity goals,'" including racial proxies and emphasizing "holistic review practices" as grounds for admitting students. At UC San Diego, admissions rates for black applicants were more than double those for white applicants in the incoming classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025. For the 2025 incoming class, the gaps between academic qualifications of admitted students in different racial groups continued and even widened compared to pre-2023 classes. Admissions data showed that a black or Hispanic student had a substantially higher chance of acceptance than a white or Asian student with identical academic credentials.
The Department determined that UCLA "discriminated against other applicants to benefit preferred races classes of Black and Hispanic," and crucially, that "this discrimination is ongoing." At UC San Diego, investigators concluded the school "has intentionally discriminated against applicants by granting and denying admissions based on their race." The report notes that UCLA's updated 2025 admissions guidance presentation included several slides with only graphics discussing "implicit bias" and promoting diversity, suggesting that admissions staff received verbal instructions encouraging the use of race and ethnicity in admissions that weren't put in writing. One UCLA admissions official reportedly "used intimidation and shaming tactics to pressure the admissions committee to unlawfully consider race in their decisions." UC San Diego created an evaluation process that used "hardship" as a racial proxy specifically to achieve its diversity agenda, de-emphasizing test scores and GPAs while prioritizing subjective criteria such as "applicants who exemplify the personal and professional attributes . . . in alignment with the school's mission, vision, and values."
According to the report's author, Lance Izumi, the cases show that educators are willing to defy state and federal laws and court rulings to implement race-based equity policies that discriminate in favor of supposedly oppressed groups such as blacks and Hispanics and against whites and Asians. California voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996, which prohibited public universities from discriminating or granting preferences based on race, and voters soundly defeated an effort to overturn it in 2020. The 2023 Supreme Court decision in the Harvard case provided clear legal guidance when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it." Yet despite this one-two punch of state constitutional prohibition and federal court clarity, the report finds that state universities crafted schemes to disguise their continued practice of discriminating based on race. The Justice Department's in-depth investigations indicate that defeating these admissions practices will require drawn-out enforcement against school after discriminating school.