What We Know About DOJ Investigations Into Medical Schools

Unlike the letters the DOJ sent to Yale, UC Davis and UC San Diego, its letter to UCLA did not include a chart comparing MCAT scores by race, nor did it list any specific scores for that year. The agency simply said, “Data provided to the Department for the incoming class of 2025 reveals disparities between the academic qualifications of admitted students in different racial groups continue to the present time.”

Beth Gellman-Beer, an 18-year Office for Civil Rights veteran who previously led the agency’s Philadelphia office, said admissions data on race can be a starting point for an investigation, but it doesn’t stand alone to prove discrimination.

“We would look at statistical evidence to see if there was any disproportionality,” she said, noting that the regional OCR office she led had been in the process of investigating some admissions discrimination cases when the office was shuttered. “But that’s not where the investigation would end. It’s just one factor that would help the direction of our investigation.”

An investigation of this type, she said, would typically compare applicants one to one to see if there were patterns of weaker applications from one racial group being selected over stronger applications from applicants of other races.

In the letters to Yale, UC Davis, and UC San Diego, the department said it evaluated applicant-level data and found that Black and Hispanic applicants with equivalent academic credentials at all three schools were more likely than white or Asian applicants to be admitted. But the letters do not describe how, exactly, the applicant-level data was analyzed. It’s also unclear whether those analyses considered other elements of the holistic admissions process, such as interviews, essays or extracurriculars.

Gellman-Beer also said such an investigation would typically include interviews with admissions professionals at the school, which these letters do not reference.

She also took issue with the department’s conclusion that a 2025 Yale admissions guidance slide deck contained graphics discussing “implicit bias” and “promoting diversity.”

“This suggests that admissions personnel are given verbal instructions during this presentation encouraging the use of race/ethnicity in admissions, and such instruction are [sic] not put in writing,” the letter said.

“That’s not evidence. That’s an inference. You can’t base a legal conclusion on an inference,” Gellman-Beer argued.

James Murphy, a senior fellow at Class Action, a higher education research and advocacy nonprofit, also noted that the admissions datasets are a small sample size of students—a fact the letters do not address. The incoming class was just 139 students at UC Davis, 140 at UC San Diego and 104 at Yale.

“If you have seven students of color in your entire class, it’s entirely possible here that admitting one student with much lower scores than everyone else because they’re a legacy—which some medical schools do—because they did get in because of a donation, because they were an absolutely incredible student in all other respects … that’s going to also skew your pool in a way it couldn’t in a much larger pool,” he said.

Multiple DOJ letters criticize medical school administrators and admissions teams for saying or implying that they hope to enroll a diverse student body and emphasizing that steps to improve socioeconomic diversity could also increase racial diversity. Each of the letters includes a subsection called “Intent to Discriminate” that describes ways in which the schools’ administrators have promoted racial diversity. UC Davis’s letter, for example, found fault with the school’s “UC Davis Scale,” which gives students a score based on socioeconomic criteria, to be considered alongside GPA and MCAT scores.

Murphy said the DOJ’s claims that using socioeconomic data in admissions is in violation of federal law is an example of the Trump administration misinterpreting the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The ruling did not disallow colleges from continuing to pursue diversity in their enrollments; it only prevented them from explicitly considering race in the admissions decision.

“What they want to claim is that that is a proxy for race,” he said. “Well, that is on them to prove that that is the case. There’s nothing in that letter that proves that’s the case … considering the background of a student, where they’re coming from, is not illegal by any means.”

Medical school leaders and patient advocates have long argued that diverse medical school classes lead to more diversity among medical professionals, which is associated with better outcomes for patients of color.

Amanda Fuchs Miller, a former deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs in the Department of Education during the Biden administration, said the DOJ’s analysis appears to be an “ironic” use of disparate impact. Last week, ED released a rule eliminating the use of disparate impact as a tool to examine how policies that are not purposefully discriminatory can negatively affect specific demographic groups.

“It seems like what they are doing is basing a lot of these findings [on disparate impact] … they’re not proving discrimination, they’re saying that these race-neutral criteria are a violation of Title VI.”

New Investigations

Last week, the Department of Education announced investigations into admissions practices at five more medical schools: Dartmouth College Geisel School of Medicine, East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine, St. Louis University School of Medicine, Western University of Health Sciences and William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine.

The group of institutions—an Ivy League university alongside less selective privates and one public—has experts scratching their heads about how the administration is selecting which medical schools to investigate. In addition to being smaller institutions, three are located in cities with significant Black populations, and one is located in a majority-Hispanic city. Gellman-Beer said historically OCR would launch its own compliance reviews based on statistical evidence, which may be what’s happening here. Similar investigations could also come out of complaints.

Miller said the shift in focus away from large, selective schools is worrying, though not entirely unexpected; when OCR sent warning letters to 60 universities related to antisemitism early last year, that list included a range of institution types.

“People are saying, ’Oh, they’re just going after these elite, selective schools,’ but they’re hurting everyone,” she said. “Regardless of if they come to any findings, it’s expensive for [these schools] to go through an investigation. It’s time-consuming. It’s resources that should be going elsewhere.

“I think it’s telling that it’s across institution type, that it is impacting rural students just as much as it is urban students … It’s the Harvards that can fight back and really afford to do that. For a lot of these other schools, it will be harder to do that.”