The U.S. Department of Justice alleged that the UC Davis School of Medicine violated federal anti-discrimination law by adopting admissions practices it says were designed to circumvent the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on race-conscious admissions. DOJ said the medical school ranked applicants using class-based “socioeconomic variables” and disadvantage measures linked to parental education and “underserved area.” DOJ further alleged that UC Davis weighted other metrics depending on how applicants fared in those disadvantage rankings and that the approach created proxies for race. The agency said the school’s admissions outcomes in 2024 showed 1.4% of White applicants versus nearly 8% of Black and Hispanic applicants, despite average GPA and MCAT scores for those groups allegedly being lower. The agency said it will sue UC Davis and other medical schools it determines to have violated the law if settlement negotiations fail to restore compliance. The case also references UC Davis’s “Davis Scale,” a socioeconomic disadvantage metric UC Davis says provides a fuller picture of applicants’ educational opportunities. This action adds to a growing set of similar DOJ investigations into medical school admissions, and it could further narrow how socioeconomic and disadvantage measures are structured and validated under federal civil-rights enforcement.