George Washington University Medical School intentionally and illegally gives Black and Hispanic applicants an advantage in admissions, the Justice Department said Thursday.
DOJ 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.
DOJ said that among students admitted in 2024 and 2025, Black applicants scored “significantly lower” on the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT, than White or Asian students.
While the school is a private institution, it receives federal money, which makes it subject to Title VI of civil rights law, which bars discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity.
It is the latest target for a Trump administration determined to bring schools into compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling restricting colleges and universities from giving explicit advantages to applicants based on their race.
The justices said both the Constitution and civil rights law prohibit the use of racial preferences in school admissions.
The justices said schools are still able to consider how race affected an individual applicant’s life, but they cannot automatically treat an application from a preferred minority candidate better than another application.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts specifically said essay questions can’t be used as end-runs around the ruling.
After that ruling, George Washington University issued guidance to the entire school banning use of self-reported “check-box data” on race in deciding whom to admit.
But 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 startlingly different educational outcomes — was a major theme of the Supreme Court’s 2023 case.
The Washington Times has reached out to the medical school for comment.
DOJ said in cases where a school is identified as discriminatory, the department will try to reach a settlement to fix things.
“If those efforts fail, the department will file suit,” DOJ said.
The 2023 decision was expected to lead schools to try to legally circumvent the bar on racial admissions, and, according to the DOJ, that’s exactly what’s come to pass.
It has launched probes of more than 15 schools to determine compliance with the ruling.
Earlier this month the department cited Duke University’s law school as being in violation.
While Duke said its admissions officers don’t see racial data for applicants, DOJ said the school instructed the officers to try to spot other information in the applications that could be used to boost Black and Hispanic students.
In July, DOJ cited the University of California San Diego’s medical school for using a “shadow application process” to boost minority students’ admissions.
The federal investigation said that school asked about “hardship” applicants had faced, then used that to spot people who were deemed “underrepresented minorities in medicine.” That information was shared with the admissions reviewers, which DOJ said ensured more of those students would be invited to interviews.
In a June finding, DOJ said University of California, Davis’s medical school 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, DOJ said.
And in May, DOJ cited Yale University’s medical school, saying even after the Supreme Court ruling the school explicitly cited “race” and “national origin” as potential factors in admissions. DOJ said the data showed Black and Hispanic students with lesser qualifications were routinely selected over White and Asian students.
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