UCLA Medical School and Racial Bias

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UCLA Medical School and Racial Bias

A lawsuit says the school continues to use race in admissions.

By The Editorial Board, WSJ

May 13, 2025 5:40 pm ET

Racial preferences in university admissions ended in 2023, or did they? A lawsuit in federal court against the University of California Geffen Medical School is worth watching as an example of how schools are complying with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Late last week the groups Students for Fair Admissions and Do No Harm sued UCLA Geffen for bias in admissions. The class-action lawsuit, which is brought on behalf of students denied admission since 2020, says UCLA used different academic standards for applicants of different races to achieve racially balanced student classes.

According to the complaint, UCLA Geffen will “routinely admit black applicants with below-average GPA and MCAT scores.” In 2023 Asians were 40.79% of the total applicants but only 29.71% of matriculants. Black applicants made up 7.86% of the applicants but 14.29% of the matriculants.

Racial preferences have been outlawed in California since a statewide referendum in 1996. But the complaint says UCLA Geffen dean Jennifer Lucero is an “outspoken advocate for using race to make admission and hiring decisions in medical schools and hospitals.”

In a 2021 interview with the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Lucero said that because of “aversive racism,” even progressives who think they aren’t racists actually are. These biases ”preserve the hierarchy of the dominant group,” which “creat(e) continued issues around structural racism.” Ergo, a medical school admissions process that thinks it is race neutral is intrinsically racist.

The lawsuit alleges that UCLA Geffen uses “holistic” reviews of applicants to determine the race of applicants and then confirms their race with interviews. The suit says Ms. Lucero and her colleagues use race and racial proxies “to make admissions decisions.”

Progressives argue that creating more black doctors is important because racial concordance—when doctor and patient are of the same race—creates better outcomes in medical care. But this new excuse for racial discrimination doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Students for Fair Admissions cited a study that found black newborns were more likely to survive if they were cared for by a black doctor. But once the newborns were grouped by birth weight, a key indicator of neo-natal risk, the discrepancy disappeared, according to Do No Harm and a Manhattan Institute analysis of the study.

UCLA Geffen didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the school has said in other contexts that it doesn’t discriminate by race.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Students for Fair Admissions that racial preferences “can not be reconciled” with the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, and that a student “must be treated based on his or her experience as an individual, not on the basis of race.” Ditto for “holistic” reviews: the Chief added that “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”

But that doesn’t mean schools won’t try. It took years after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 for the civil-rights movement to defeat “massive resistance” to integrating schools in the South. The same diligence will be required to end racial discrimination in progressive universities.