DOJ says GW medical school used race in 2024 and 2025 admissions

The Justice Department said Thursday that George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences intentionally used race in admissions for its 2024 and 2025 entering classes, the latest and most concrete sign yet that the Trump administration is moving from broad post-affirmative-action warnings to case-by-case enforcement against graduate and professional programs. DOJ said it is now pursuing settlement negotiations to bring the school into compliance. (justice.gov)

The announcement matters beyond one campus because it turns a legal principle into an operational problem. Since the Supreme Court’s June 29, 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, colleges have known they cannot award an admissions advantage because of an applicant’s race. What many admissions offices have been trying to sort out since then is where lawful individualized review ends and unlawful racial preference begins when essays, interviews, adversity ratings, and mission-based review are still on the table. DOJ is now arguing that GW Med crossed that line. (supremecourt.gov)

This is a Justice Department finding, not a court judgment. George Washington University has not, at least publicly, conceded the point. The student newspaper The GW Hatchet reported that a university spokesperson said officials were reviewing the allegations in DOJ’s letter and called the findings “incorrect.” (justice.gov)

How DOJ says GW Med crossed the line

In its Aug. 27 press release, DOJ said GW Med violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling by using essay prompts and other materials to identify applicants’ race after the university had already issued post-SFFA guidance telling admissions staff not to give a preference based on racial or ethnic identity “self-reported and collected on the check-box data sections” of applications. According to DOJ, Black applicants had a significantly higher chance of receiving interviews and disproportionately higher interview scores than comparable Asian applicants. The department also said admitted Black students had significantly lower MCAT scores than white or Asian applicants in the 2024 and 2025 classes, and that white and Asian applicants were regularly denied in favor of lower-credentialed Black and Hispanic applicants. Those are DOJ’s allegations and findings; the department has not yet, in material it publicly released Thursday, published the full underlying statistical analysis. (justice.gov)

That tension between a school’s written policy and what reviewers actually do is central to the case. GW’s November 2023 university guidance said the institution remained committed to diversity and inclusion, but it also summarized the new legal limit clearly: students could discuss how race shaped their lives, yet admissions decisions had to be tied to the applicant’s individual experiences and qualities rather than race itself. DOJ’s theory is that GW Med used essays and interview-stage review not just to understand an applicant’s story, but to infer race and reward it. (provost.gwu.edu)

That distinction is exactly where many professional schools have been operating since 2023. GW Med’s public admissions page still describes a process that weighs service, resilience, cultural competency, interpersonal skill, leadership, and academic achievement alongside test scores and coursework. The AAMC likewise tells medical schools that “mission-aligned selection” can still consider experiences, attributes, academic metrics, and competencies together. In other words, medical schools were never expected to become MCAT-only sorting machines after SFFA. But DOJ is making clear that subjective tools such as essays and interviews are now likely to receive the same scrutiny once reserved for explicit race-conscious policies. (smhs.gwu.edu)

What this changes for admissions offices

For higher-ed operators, the practical lesson from the GW case is not simply “remove the race checkbox.” It is that every stage of the process now needs a defensible record. If an essay is meant to measure resilience, service orientation, or leadership, schools may need to show exactly how those traits are defined, how readers are trained to score them, and whether the scoring is applied consistently across applicants. If interviews are part of selection, schools may need tighter rubrics, clearer calibration, and cleaner notes than many programs historically kept. That is an inference from DOJ’s theory in this case, but it is also consistent with the AAMC’s own framework, which says selection criteria should be clearly defined, transparently communicated, equitably applied, and informed by evidence. (justice.gov)

The second operational lesson is about proxies. The Supreme Court did not ban applicants from writing about race, discrimination, or identity. It said schools cannot treat race itself as the benefit-conferring factor. DOJ now appears to be testing whether schools that pivoted toward essays about hardship, identity, community, or lived experience are in fact using those materials to do indirectly what SFFA forbids directly. DOJ made a similar argument in its July finding against UC San Diego’s medical school, where it said staff used “hardship” questions and subjective review to sort applicants in ways that increased admission chances for underrepresented minorities. (supremecourt.gov)

That has obvious consequences for graduate and professional programs beyond medicine. A law school, business school, or school of education may still want applicants to explain the communities they serve, the barriers they have overcome, or the perspectives they would bring to a cohort. But if internal emails, reader notes, interview comments, or scoring patterns suggest the real purpose is to identify race and treat it as a plus factor, the paper policy may not save the institution. In that sense, DOJ’s GW finding is less a warning about diversity statements than about documentation, reviewer behavior, and statistical audit trails. (provost.gwu.edu)

Another sign the crackdown is widening

The GW finding did not come out of nowhere. DOJ announced in January that it had opened a Title VI compliance review related to DEI in student admissions at GW, and the university said at the time that it planned to cooperate and demonstrate compliance. Since then, the department has built a broader enforcement portfolio: findings against UCLA’s medical school on May 6, Yale’s medical school on May 14, UC Davis’s medical school on June 10, UC San Diego’s medical school on July 20, and Duke Law on Aug. 6, plus a June 4 announcement that it had opened 15 additional medical-school investigations. (federalupdates.gwu.edu)

That broader pattern is what makes the GW case useful to read as policy, not just politics. The administration is not only saying that race-conscious admissions are unlawful after SFFA; it is also building a public playbook for how it will try to prove violations. In these cases, DOJ has focused on internal guidance, essay design, interview scoring, admissions-stage access to demographic information, and outcome gaps between racial groups. Even schools that strongly disagree with the department’s reasoning would be hard-pressed to miss the message: if reviewers can infer race from application materials, and if race-correlated disparities show up at key decision points, investigators may treat those facts as evidence of intentional discrimination. (justice.gov)

What remains uncertain is how far DOJ will push its remedy at GW and how the university will answer once settlement talks either produce an agreement or break down. GW’s admissions portal is already live for the 2027 cycle, which means any required changes to prompts, interview processes, or reviewer training may have to happen on an active timeline, not at some distant policy-review date. For medical schools, graduate admissions offices, and university counsel, that may be the most immediate takeaway: the era of treating post-SFFA compliance as a memo-writing exercise is over, and the next test is whether institutions can prove that what happens in the reading room matches what is written in the policy manual. (portal.smhs.gwu.edu)