UCLA Med School in Big Trouble for Using Affirmative Action
The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it is seeking to join a lawsuit against the University of California, Los Angeles, medical school for what it calls a “systemically racist approach” to admissions.
The suit was originally brought by Do No Harm, which opposes DEI in medicine, and Students for Fair Admissions, which was the successful plaintiff in the 2023 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that “affirmative action” is illegal racial discrimination. (RELATED: Temple Shows DEI’s Ongoing Hold on Medical Schools)
The DOJ revealed eye-popping information in its court filing that shows the enormous extent to which UCLA has continued to racially discriminate post–Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. It seems as though UCLA has spit upon the Supreme Court’s ruling and decided that it will ignore the Constitution for the sake of having more students — and therefore future doctors — who belong to its preferred races, actual qualifications be damned. (RELATED: What on Earth Is Going on at the University of Wisconsin’s Medical School?)
In the filing Wednesday, the DOJ revealed the MCAT scores of students attending UCLA by race. Quite clear is that there is a major differential in the scores by race.
Here’s how the MCAT scores for UCLA’s matriculating medical school class for 2024 broke down:
Hispanic students: 66th percentile
Black students: 75th percentile
White students: 86th percentile
Asian students: 90th percentile
In other words, the school has entirely different standards for admitting Hispanic, black, white, and Asian students. This is, of course, in spite of the fact that qualified applicants to UCLA come from every race.
DOJ also has data from 2021, 2022, and 2023, and it looks as if UCLA did nothing to correct its racially discriminatory behavior after SFFA v. Harvard came out.
Here’s what the scores looked like in 2022, the year before SFFA v. Harvard was decided:
Hispanic students: 69th percentile
Black students: 72nd percentile
White students: 88th percentile
Asian students: 88th percentile
In 2023, after SFFA v. Harvard, the differential actually got slightly larger:
Hispanic students: 68th percentile
Black students: 68th percentile
White students: 88th percentile
Asian students: 88th percentile
This should all really be no surprise. Affirmative action has been illegal in California since 1997, so UCLA officials weren’t going to let another pesky declaration of illegality stop them from pursuing their project of racial balancing. (RELATED: A Different Midterm Milestone)
This should also be no surprise because, in 2024, the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium broke a story in which he revealed that academic standards at UCLA’s medical school have dramatically fallen due to what whistleblowers said was affirmative action.
The story included interviews with eight professors at UCLA’s medical school, leaked correspondence between UCLA officials, and data showing declines in student performance on standardized tests known as shelf exams. The Department of Justice, in its Wednesday court filing, repeated anonymous quotes from that Free Beacon story.
UCLA medical school’s Associate Dean for Admissions Jennifer Lucero, who is a defendant in the lawsuit, is documented in the Free Beacon article to be particularly obsessed with giving a leg up to students who belong to her favorite races.
In 2021, the UCLA admissions team was allegedly considering the application of a black individual whose grades and test scores were both below UCLA’s averages. Reportedly, when one admissions officer indicated this person may not be the best candidate, Lucero “exploded in anger.”
“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” she reportedly said, before going on to say that this person’s lower grades and scores didn’t matter because “we need people like this in the medical school.”
One admissions officer was frank in telling the Free Beacon that there were different standards for different races at UCLA. “All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races,” this person said. “For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded.”
An admissions committee member further told the Free Beacon that the bar for black and Hispanic students is “as low as you could possibly imagine” and that it “completely disregards grades and achievements.”
Four members of UCLA’s admissions committee testified that black and Hispanic applications were routinely given “a pass for subpar metrics,” whereas white and Asian applicants “need near perfect scores to even be considered.”
Reportedly, Lucero went so far with her racial obsession that, after a Native American applicant was rejected, she made members of the admissions committee “sit through a two-hour lecture on Native history delivered by her own sister.”
The DOJ’s filing notes that Lucero has not ceased this obsession, as she still states on her official website profile that “she takes a special interest in diversity issues in medicine.”
DOJ’s court filing documents how race is considered at every level of the UCLA admissions process. In one open-ended essay students can respond to, for example, “Black applicants,” are, according to DOJ, “asked to reveal their race so that UCLA Med can know and consider it.” (The question from 2024 reads: “Do you identify as being part of a group that has been marginalized (examples include, but are not limited to LGBTQIA, disabilities, federally recognized tribe) in terms of access to education or healthcare? If you answered ‘Yes’ …, describe how this inequity has impacted you or your community and how educational disparity, health disparity and/or marginalization has impacted you and your community.”) Additionally, students are interviewed face-to-face or online, giving the admissions committee a chance to assess which race an applicant belongs to.
Of course, UCLA’s medical school is unfortunately far from alone in continuing to discriminate on the basis of race, even though it is tasked with the responsibility of training America’s future doctors. Last year, it was revealed that, at the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, black applicants are six times more likely to be admitted than Asian applicants. (READ MORE: What on Earth Is Going on at the University of Wisconsin’s Medical School?)
DOJ’s filing does an excellent job of spelling out the “disastrous outcomes” of racial discrimination at medical schools in particular.
First, different standards by race result in lower standards for some, meaning that there will be “less well academically qualified doctors.” Second, lower admissions standards for certain races will mean that patients will question whether a doctor who is Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, or Native American is really as qualified as a white or Asian doctor. “This shadow follows [underrepresented minority] doctors throughout their careers, whether or not that doctor needed a preference to be admitted to medical school,” writes DOJ. Third, racial discrimination in medical school admissions “undermines and delays delivery upon the promise enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that each state government, including UCLA Med, will treat its citizens equally without regard to their race.”
The Department of Justice makes the law clear: Admissions committees are asked to judge applicants only on their merit and not allow race to affect how candidates are considered. “There is but one legal avenue for a public or publicly funded medical school to pursue diversity in medicine: admit the most qualified candidates regardless of race, and expect that those most qualified candidates will come from every race, because they do.”
The hope is that, by seeking to join this lawsuit, the Trump administration will scare off other medical schools from perniciously using race in selecting the country’s future doctors.
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