The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences intentionally and illegally gives Black and Hispanic applicants an advantage in admissions, the Justice Department said Thursday.
The department said the school, while purportedly banning explicit preferences, scours applications for other indicators that suggest students are Black or Hispanic and gives those cases a boost.
“GW Med’s admissions practices reveal an intent to prioritize racial diversity over merit, which is unlawful and poses legitimate public health consequences for the patients its future doctors will serve,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
The Justice Department said that among students admitted in 2024 and 2025, Black applicants scored “significantly lower” on the Medical College Admission Test than White or Asian students.
Although the school is a private institution, it receives federal funds, making it subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.
It is the latest target for a Trump administration determined to bring schools into compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which restricted colleges and universities from giving explicit advantages to applicants based on their race.
The court said the Constitution and civil rights law prohibit the use of racial preferences in school admissions. The justices said schools can still consider how race affected an individual applicant’s life, but they cannot automatically treat an application from a preferred minority candidate more favorably than another application.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the majority opinion that essay questions cannot be used as a means of circumventing the ruling.
After that ruling, George Washington University issued guidance to the entire school banning the use of self-reported “check-box data” on race in deciding whom to admit.
However, the medical school “used other sources to discover an applicant’s race,” the Justice Department said. Those other sources included essay questions that the department said were intentionally designed to elicit the race and ethnicity data.
That information was then used to decide which candidates to bring in for interviews.
“GW Med regularly denied admission to White and Asian applicants in favor of lower credentialed Black and Hispanic applicants,” the department said.
Black applicants in particular got a higher rate of interviews and scored higher on their interviews than “comparable Asian applicants,” the Justice Department said.
The pitting of Asian American applicants against Black applicants — both racial minorities in the U.S., albeit with vastly different educational outcomes — was a major theme of the Supreme Court’s 2023 case.
The university, in a statement, said it was reviewing the letter but disagreed with the department’s conclusions.
“Our School of Medicine and Health Sciences admissions process fully complies with the law. The university remains steadfastly committed to non-discrimination and Title VI compliance while advancing our academic missions and excellence in preparing health care leaders,” the university said.
The Justice Department said that in cases where a school is found to be discriminatory, it will seek a settlement to address the situation.
“If those efforts fail, the department will file suit,” the Justice Department said.
The 2023 decision was expected to lead schools to try to legally circumvent the bar on racial admissions, and, according to the Justice Department, that is exactly what has come to pass.
The Justice Department opened 15 additional investigations in June to determine compliance with the ruling, bringing the total number of probes across the Justice Department and Department of Education to at least 26.
Earlier this month, the department cited Duke University School of Law as being in violation.
Although Duke said its admissions officers do not see applicants’ racial data, the Justice Department said the school instructed the officers to look for other information in applications that could be used to boost Black and Hispanic students.
In July, the Justice Department cited the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine for using a “shadow application process” to boost minority students’ admissions.
The Justice Department said the school asked about “hardship” applicants had faced, then used that information to identify applicants deemed “underrepresented minorities in medicine” and to funnel them to admissions reviewers. The department said this process ensured more of those students would be invited to interviews.
In a June finding, the Justice Department said the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine used family income, parental education or geographic area as proxies for race. The result was Black and Hispanic students admitted at rates “up to six times higher” than Whites and Asians, the Justice Department said.
In May, the Justice Department cited the Yale School of Medicine, saying even after the Supreme Court ruling, the school explicitly cited “race” and “national origin” as potential factors in admissions. The Justice Department said the data showed Black and Hispanic students with lesser qualifications were routinely selected over White and Asian students.
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