On June 4, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division opened new investigations into “potential race discrimination” at 15 medical schools.
Here is what to know.
1. The medical schools under investigation have not been named, but all received millions of dollars in federal taxpayer funding. The investigations will focus on the schools’ admissions policies to ensure that students are accepted based on merit, not race, and are in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, according to a Justice Department news release.
2. The investigation comes after the Justice Department found admissions policies at University of California at Los Angeles and Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., discriminated based on race. Those investigations, which concluded in May, found that both universities had policies that favored Black and Hispanic applicants over their white and Asian counterparts.
3. In March, the Trump administration expanded its crackdown on university diversity practices, launching investigations into medical school admissions at Stanford (Calif.) University, Columbus-based Ohio State University and the University of California San Diego.
4. These investigations are based around the Supreme Court ruling that affirmative action policies were unconstitutional.
Since the 2023 ruling, racial and ethnic diversity declined in medical school admissions and matriculations, a 2025 study found. Researchers found that before the ruling, there were no racial or ethnic differences in acceptance rates. In 2024, underrepresented in medicine — Black, Hispanic, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander —- student matriculation into U.S. medical schools declined.
Between the pre- and post-Supreme Court ruling ruling periods, white student representation decreased in matriculation by 1.94 percentage points, Asian student representation increased 5.19 percentage points, and underrepresented in medicine student representation decreased 3.56 percentage points.
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