Black applicants to UCSF's medical school were admitted at a rate of 7%. White applicants: 1.7%. Asian applicants: 2%. The white and Asian applicants had higher MCAT scores and higher GPAs.
The Department of Justice noticed.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, sent UCSF a nine-page warning letter this week laying out what the numbers already make obvious. "Unfortunately, at UCSF Medical School, MCAT scores and undergraduate GPAs have taken a backseat to race," Dhillon wrote. The letter gives UCSF ten days to comply — with a deadline of October 2, 2026 — or face a federal lawsuit.
The specific numbers are worth sitting with. Among admitted students, black applicants averaged an MCAT score of 514 and a GPA of 3.86. Hispanic applicants: 513 MCAT, 3.88 GPA. Asian applicants: 518 MCAT, 3.93 GPA. White applicants: 519 MCAT, 3.95 GPA. Hispanic applicants were admitted at 4.8%. So the groups with the lowest test scores and GPAs were admitted at two to four times the rate of the groups with the highest.
Dhillon's summary was surgical: "In other words, the average admitted black and Hispanic student academically underperformed the average rejected white and Asian student."
This is a medical school. Not a poetry seminar. Not a DEI workshop. A place where the people you admit will eventually hold a scalpel over someone's open chest. UCSF receives nearly $1 billion in federal funding annually, plus a $5 million DOJ grant. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act says institutions that take federal money cannot discriminate on the basis of race. The Supreme Court said the same thing when it struck down affirmative action. UCSF kept doing it anyway.
The DOJ investigation began in March 2026. UCSF was granted multiple filing extensions and still failed to submit complete data. The school's pipeline program — designed to funnel students into its medical program — enrolled 89% of its participants from "underrepresented groups" in the 2024-25 academic year. The feeder system was built to produce exactly the admissions skew the DOJ found.
UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood's office responded with a statement that reads like it was drafted by a committee that hadn't read the letter: "Admission to the UCSF School of Medicine is among the most selective in the country. Academic excellence has always been central to our admissions process." The data in the DOJ's own letter says otherwise. When the group admitted at the highest rate has the lowest average scores, "academic excellence" is not what's central to the process.
Dhillon put the legal standard plainly: "The Supreme Court has spoken clearly — federally funded medical schools may not admit students based on misguided and illegal notions of diversity. Aspiring doctors should be admitted based on their qualifications."
The pattern here isn't complicated. The Court ruled. Universities were told to stop. Some stopped. Others — like UCSF — decided the ruling applied to other schools and kept running the same system under the same assumptions with the same outcomes. The DOJ is now making the point that the ruling wasn't a suggestion.
October 2 is the deadline. Nearly $1 billion in federal funding is on the table. UCSF's MCAT average for admitted white students was 519. For admitted black students, 514. The school called that "academic excellence."
The DOJ called it what it is.
