Editors at National Review Online scrutinize efforts to take race out of American college admissions.
Conservatives have long suspected that university admissions policies were violating civil rights in the name of promoting diversity, but the Trump administration is actually doing something to expose and punish the practice.
The Department of Justice concluded its yearlong compliance review of the admissions practices at the UCLA medical school and determined that it is violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by granting and denying acceptance on the basis of race, particularly to the benefit of less qualified black and Hispanic applicants. According to a recent document from the DOJ, the medical school’s “internal policies, publicly distributed literature, and email correspondence of its leadership” demonstrate an intent to use race in admissions — and the commitment to DEI was so unwavering that Jennifer Lucero, the associate dean of admissions, employed “intimidation and shaming tactics to pressure the admissions committee to unlawfully consider race in their decisions.”
The medical school purported to practice the “holistic” assessment of applicants by considering data aside from objective metrics like MCAT scores and GPAs, but the Justice Department insists that this approach “does not explain the major disparities it has produced in objective academic metrics between racial groups.” In particular, black and Hispanic students with “significantly lower median” MCAT and GPAs are admitted. Data from the 2023 incoming class showed that black and Hispanic students had a median MCAT score in the 68th percentile of test takers, compared with the 88th percentile for both white and Asian students. In fact, the medical school had announced that its MCAT cutoff score would be 512 beginning in the 2019 admissions cycle — yet the median score for black and Hispanic students in the incoming 2024 class was 508 and 506, respectively. Rather revealingly, the students enrolled in that cohort who “declined” to disclose their race had the highest median score and percentile ranking, suggesting that overly qualified students of disfavored racial groups knew that they would be discriminated against and therefore deliberately hid their identity.
