BUZZ
Essay questions ‘were designed to elicit information about an applicant’s race’
The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Services used essay questions in the admissions process to admit more black students, the Department of Justice found.
The schools violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned race discrimination in higher education, according to a Thursday news release from the DOJ.
GWU had told its schools they could not give any advantage based on the race or ethnicity that applicants checked off on the application form.
To work around this guidance, GW Med included essay questions in its application “that were designed to elicit information about an applicant’s race or ethnicity,” the news release states.
The DOJ found “black applicants had a significantly higher probability of being selected for an interview, and received disproportionately higher interview scores, than comparable Asian applicants.”
White and Asian students scored much higher on the MCAT than black applicants who were admitted in 2024 and 2025. Those white and Asian students were rejected from the school so that it could admit black and Hispanic applicants “with weaker credentials,” the release states.
“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,” DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said.
“The law is simple — admissions officers can no longer discriminate based on race in the name of diversity,” she said.
The Justice Department has found that several other universities have also discriminated based on race in admissions, including the University of California Los Angeles, Yale School of Medicine, and the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
Further, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice recently opened investigations into five medical schools over alleged continued use of racial preferences in admissions.
The Department of Justice also launched investigations into over 15 medical schools for alleged racial discrimination in June.
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