The Supreme Court told American universities that race-based admissions were illegal. That was 2023. UC San Diego's medical school responded by building a workaround — and kept running it for two years. That is until the Department of Justice caught them.
Worse for UCSD: the DOJ found internal documents proving the discrimination was intentional.
According to DOJ findings UCSD Medical School created an evaluation system that used "hardship" as a racial proxy, "specifically to achieve its diversity agenda." The memo is explicit: this wasn't a residual policy that hadn't been updated. It was a purpose-built mechanism designed to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — the 2023 decision that left almost no room for interpretation. Race cannot be a factor in admissions. Period.
UCSD's answer was to label race as something else.
The DOJ found what it described as a "significant disparity in objective academic metrics" between the applicants who were selected and the ones who weren't. More qualified white and Asian applicants were passed over. Less credentialed applicants with the right demographic profile got in. Internal documents showed staff specifically intended to favor underrepresented minorities — their words, in writing, after the ruling came down.
This is a medical school. The students who come out of this program will perform surgery, prescribe medication, and make split-second decisions about whether patients live or die. The admissions office was deciding who gets to do that based not on MCAT scores or academic performance, but on whether an applicant's skin color could be coded as the right kind of hardship.
UCSD's spokesperson said the university is "proud to produce some of the highest-performing physicians and researchers in the nation" and "remains committed to full compliance with federal law." That's an interesting commitment to announce in the same week the DOJ determined you were violating federal law — with documentation.
The DOJ is currently seeking a voluntary settlement. If the university refuses, a lawsuit follows.
The SFFA decision was supposed to end this. It reversed decades of precedent and told every university in America, in plain language, that the game was over. What UCSD's internal documents reveal is that some schools heard the ruling, understood it, and started looking for ways around it anyway. The "hardship" proxy wasn't a misunderstanding of the law. It was a deliberate attempt to evade it.
A medical school that selects students by skin color instead of demonstrated ability isn't progressive. It's a liability. And now it's a defendant.