Higher Ed Just Got a Preview of What Is Going to Happen with ACTS

On May 6, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division sent out a press release announcing it had “completed a year-long investigation into the admissions policies and practices at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)” and that it had “uncovered evidence that UCLA’s leadership intentionally selected applicants based on their race…after the Supreme Court’s decision in Harvard by granting and denying admission on the basis of race.” Based on the evidence presented in a letter to UCLA’s counsel, the DOJ did nothing of the sort. What the letter indicates is that the Department has a shaky grasp of what the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in SFFA v. Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill actually said, an even shakier grasp of how admissions works, and no grasp at all on what the federal government’s role is since the DOJ seems to think it should be able to dictate who is qualified to be a doctor in the United States and who is not. I’ll have more to say on that below, but I want to address a more pressing issue first.

Every College Could Be the Next UCLA

I assume that UCLA’s lawyers will be challenging these findings and will likely succeed given the weaknesses of the investigation, but that is cold comfort to the rest of higher education and, in particular, the institutions that have been targeted by the Trump Administration. The new ACTS survey component will soon make almost 2,000 colleges and universities subject to the same cursory investigation that DOJ used against UCLA’s med school. This investigation and its findings based on little more than a blunt racial comparison of test scores and GPAs are a preview of what some colleges and universities are going to facing in the coming months. Is higher ed ready?

But wait! Didn’t a judge rule that most of the Ivy Plus and about 200 more colleges and universities do not need to submit ACTS data? Yes, but the injunction he issued only applied to data submission, not to the federal government’s use of data that has already been submitted. Many of the colleges covered by the injunction had already submitted some or all of the seven years of required data. According to the Department of Education (ED), 129 of the institutions covered by the injunction “have cleaned, locked, or completed all required years of data.” Dozens more have submitted some years of data. (You can look up the status of an institution’s ACTS submission here.) Without a court preventing them from doing so, I cannot imagine that the DOJ and ED will have any compunction of using data from just a few years or that has not been through the complete submission process in an “investigation.” Higher ed better be ready.

The Serious Flaws in the DOJ Investigation of UCLA

One way to get ready is to read the letter DOJ sent to UCLA’s counsel in order to identify the agency’s strategy and the many flaws in it. Here are some of the serious problems with the investigation and its findings.

1. It was a fast investigation.
   • DOJ claims it conducted a year-long investigation before reaching these findings, but the starting date of this investigation is not at all clear. The letter refers to the “United States’ May 9, 2025 Title VI Inquiry,” but that inquiry was an investigation into claims of antisemitism that began on May 9, 2025. That investigation was resolved (also very quickly) in July, 2025. On September 16, 2025, DOJ sent a Supplemental Request for Information to ULCA, presumably for med school admissions data. DOJ only joined a lawsuit that had been filed by Students for Fair Admissions and other private groups at the end of January, 2026. That SFFA lawsuit was filed a year ago, and before that, in March 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was investigating the admissions process at a “California medical school,” presumably UCLA. All signs point to this investigation taking less than a year. The haste shows.
   • Even if DOJ did spend a year on the investigation, that is not a lot of time. In 1988, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) initiated an investigation of the Harvard admissions office based on “the concern … that, despite superior academic credentials in terms of high school performance and standardized test scores, Asian Americans have been admitted to selective schools at a rate lower than white applicants and other minority group applicants.” It took OCR two years to complete its investigation, and it likely had a much larger staff then compared to the DOJ’s civil rights division today. According to one report, the civil rights division lost 75% of its lawyers in 2025.
2. This was a cursory investigation.
   • The DOJ letter provides very little information on what the civil rights division investigation entailed and what evidence it considered. It is possible that there is a longer report that may be released, but it seems likely that this letter to UCLA’s counsel would feature the agency’s strongest cased agianst UCLA. The letter refers to the med school’s “internal policies, publicly distributed literature, and email correspondence of its leadership” and cites
     • one email that shared a document created by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), not UCLA, on how to respond to the SFFA decision;
     • the use in the admissions process of another AAMC product, the Professional Readiness Exam (PREview), which assesses “the ability to judge effective and ineffective professional behaviors in situations they are likely to encounter in schools”;
     • short answer questions on the application that include questions about being a member of a marginalized group and the impact it might have had on the applicant;
     • a memo from the admissions committee chairs;
     • a slide deck containing “graphics that discuss issues such as “implicit bias” and promoting diversity” and that, once again, appear to have been produced by AAMC in 2013(see below), not UCLA;
     • and two tables showing the median GPA and CAT scores of enrolled students, one from a year before the SFFA decision would have applied and one from a year after. We can expect many more tables like this being produced with ACTS data.
   • Compare this evidentiary base to the 1988-90 OCR investigation of Harvard’s admissions policies and practices. It is easy to see why it took two years, since it considered a huge amount of material. According to one trial document from SFFA v. Harvard, the “OCR reviewed ten years of admissions data; interviewed current and former Admissions Office staff, students who had worked in the Admissions Office, alumni interviewers, and Asian-American community leaders; reviewed 400 complete application files and 2,000 additional summary sheets; and analyzed the Admissions Office’s implementation of its policies and procedure.” After it found that Asian American applicants received lower personal scores on average than their peers did, OCR “conducted an audit of application files and summary sheets to investigate the cause of the difference.” While the letter to UCLA reporting the DOJ findings is just over six pages, the 1990 OCR report is 46 pages long and includes sophisticated statistical analysis of Harvard’s admissions process, including the applicant pool, not just enrolled students.
3. The DOJ appears to be unfamiliar with the Supreme Court’s decision.
   • The letter accuses the med school of “discriminating on the basis of race in the incoming classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025.” The problem there is that the Supreme Court opinion was released in June, 2023, which means that the class that started that year had been admitted before the decision.
   • The letter to UCLA’s counsel outlines several infractions that are not in fact infractions.
     • It accuses the medical school’s admissions office of using methods to determine the race of applicants. There is, in fact, nothing illegal about determining the race of applicants. If there were, the Department of Education would be in violation of SFFA since it now asks colleges and universities to report the race of applicants, admitted students, and enrollees. What is illegal is considering the racial identity of an applicant in the admissions process, but the DOJ provides no proof that the med school’s admissions office did that.
     • The DOJ letter calls out short answer questions that ask students to talk about the impact of belonging to a marginalized group, but that is perfectly legal according to the Supreme Court. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts went out of his way to say that admissions offices could not consider the fact of someone’s racial identity in the admissions process but they could consider the impact race had on their individual experience and character.
     • The DOJ suggests that the distribution of an AAMC document citing “diversity goals” and promoting a “theory that increasing ‘diversity’ of the healthcare workforce will improve healthcare outcomes for Black and Hispanic patients” indicates a intention to discriminate. If having “diversity goals” is in violation of the Supreme Court decision, someone needs to tell the Chief Justice, who described these goals as “commendable” in his opinion. DOJ’s suggestion that a diverse workforce makes for better healthcare is just a “theory” (FWIW, theories aren’t bad) both ignores the literature on this issue and fails to indicate any intention to discriminate, because, once again, pursuing diversity is not illegal. Considering race in an admissions process is. The DOJ calls out the use of race-neutral strategies and holistic admissions policies as strategies to increase diversity, calling them proxies for race, but the SFFA decision did not ban either practice. If anything, it continued to endorse them. In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas notes, “Race-neutral policies may…achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without any of the burdens and strife generated by affirmative action policies.”
4. The DOJ appears not to understand how med school admissions works.
   • In one of the most bizarre moments in the letter, DOJ calls out the fact that UCLA’s med school “interviews further enable the committee to know applicants’ race and ethnicity.” I’ve already covered the fact that knowing an applicant’s race is not illegal, so let’s consider what DOJ is suggesting here: medical school interviews are illegal? Or, at the very least, indicate an intention to break the law? If this is so, DOJ has a lot of work ahead of it since every single medical school but one that belongs to AAMC uses interviews in its admissions process.
   • If most of the weak evidence that DOJ offers up is meant to speak to an intent to discriminate, the two data tables are supposed to be the evidence of discrimination. The problem is that the data presented does not and cannot prove discrimination because it leaves out so much information.
     • The tables only consider enrollments and nowhere in the letter does DOJ indicate the demographics of who applied and who was admitted. The applicant and admit pool have a significant impact on who enrolls, as can recruitment strategies and yield strategies. Near the end of the letter, DOJ claims that “highly qualified White, Asian, and other students were denied admission on the basis of their race.” If that’s true, the agency has not provided evidence of it since it has provided no evidence of who applied, who was admitted, and who did not enroll after being admitted. It is entirely possible–even likely-that students with high MCAT scores and GPAs were admitted to the med school but enrolled at other schools. That’s the thing with the most highly qualified applicants–they tend to get into multiple med schools but they can only enroll in one.
     • The DOJ assumes that enrollment outcomes are determined solely by UCLA’s policies. That is false. College admissions takes place in a complex ecosystem, in which what happens at one institution shapes and is shaped by what happens at other institutions. A recent study I published at Class Action and similar research from the College Board found strong evidence of a cascade effect in post-SFFA enrollment outcomes. Cascade effects are likely to have an even greater impact among medical schools, since there are many fewer of them compared to undergraduate institutions.
     • The tables cover just two years, one pre-SFFA and one post-SFFA, even though UCLA shared data for the 2021-2024 Admissions Cycles, according to a footnote on page five. A more responsible comparison would compare multiple years of post-SFFA enrollment to multiple years of pre-SFFA enrollment in order to account for outlier years. Leaving out enrollment data from 2021 and 2022 without an explanation raises questions.
     • The table only reports median scores and GPAs without reporting how many students were in each demographic group. The letter fails to provide basic information, such as how did the enrollment numbers for each racial demographic change after SFFA? UCLA must have provided that information; it’s absence from the letter is strange.
5. The DOJ wants to determine who should be a doctor, but that is the job of medical schools, not the federal government.
   • As Julie Park put in a recent piece in Inside Higher Ed, the DOJ letter indicates that the agency believes that medical school admission should come down to two items: MCAT scores and GPA. That is not how med school admissions works, and it is not how it should work. Med schools have more priorities than admitting students with big numbers. America needs all kinds of doctors.
     • They want to make sure that they enroll students who will work in multiple disciplines.
     • Med schools want to produce researchers and professors, but that is not all they want to produce. Most doctors are not going to be working in labs; they are going to be caring for patients, where academic credentials matter of course but are not the only qualifications. If I am sick I want a doctor who is knowledgeable and compassionate; I do not care how they scored on the Verbal section of the MCAT.
     • Med schools want students who show compassion and a dedication to providing care; those qualities can of course coincide with a perfect GPA but they don’t always.
     • Many public med schools, like UCLA, provide an advantage to in-state students.
   • MCAT scores and GPA do have a solid correlation with performance on the first step of the USMLE Step 1 exam, which med school students take as the first part of the process of being licensed as doctors, but that does not mean that schools should only seek the highest MCAT scores and GPAs. It should be noted that the DOJ letter makes no comment on the performance of enrolled students at the medical school.
   • DOJ provides wants to reduce medical school admissions to a test score and GPA, but it makes no case whatsoever for doing so. It presents no evidence of a correlation between high scores and grades and being a good doctor; it does not even make a case for what makes a good doctor.
   • We should look at this DOJ letter for what it is: a gross case of government overreach. The federal government should not determine who gets to be a doctor in the United States. Med schools should.