University denies allegations, saying it is committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all laws
The Department of Justice said on Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles illegally considered race in admissions.
The announcement follows a similar accusation against the university’s medical school and comes as the Trump administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students.
The Trump administration has also accused the UC Berkeley School of Law and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.
The UCLA School of Law denied the accusations and said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.
“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”
Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 supreme court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but the president has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions – which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.
The justice department said UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. The department said its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.
The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House”, how to reveal their race in essays.
“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the justice department’s civil rights division, in a news release.
The Trump administration earlier this year tried to compel higher education institutions to release data including the race and sex of colleges’ applicants, admitted students and enrolled students to enable it to investigate whether the schools were considering race in admissions.
A federal judge in August halted that effort, granting a preliminary injunction after 17 Democratic state attorneys general filed suit.
The federal judge said the federal government probably had the authority to collect the data, but the demand was rolled out to universities in a “rushed and chaotic” manner.
The states argued the data collection risked invading student privacy and leading to baseless investigations of colleges and universities. They also argued that universities had not been given enough time to collect the data.