UCLA Law School Runs a Two-Tiered Admissions System Based on Race

Liberals prattle constantly about supposed white skin privileges.

But it sounds like being white is actually a liability if you want to attend UCLA law school.

The Trump Justice Department earlier this month determined that the school brazenly discriminates against whites and Asians in admissions in favor of lesser-qualified blacks.

Nevertheless, last week a former UCLA law school admissions officer named in the report for illegally encouraging applicants to reveal their race  insisted to the California Globe that the Justice Department findings about him and the school were false, but refused to elaborate on his curious assertion.

Similarly, in its official response, the school denied all wrongdoing, even though it is their own statistics that show blacks were consistently admitted with lower LSAT scores than whites.

Talk about institutional racism!

For example, the Department found that for the classes of 2024 and 2025, “half of the admitted black applicants had LSAT scores that were at or below 90% of the admitted white applicants.”

The DOJ also determined that the school consistently rejected whites with the same test scores as blacks that it admitted.

Announcing the findings, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said that, “Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin.”

In a 7-page letter to a UCLA lawyer on the findings,  Dhillon said that she determined, based on the school’s “documents and data,” that UCLA law school was “discriminating against white and Asian applicants” in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 2023 Supreme Court ruling barring racial preferences for university admissions.

Dhillon said that, “According to our analysis of UCLA Law’s admissions data, an applicant’s race has a large effect on how he or she is treated by the UCLA Law admissions committee. For the 2025 incoming class, black applicants had approximately seven times the odds of admissions to UCLA Law compared to otherwise equivalent white applicants. Hispanic applicants that year had approximately two times the odds of admission compared to otherwise equivalent white applicants.”

And the “median LSAT scores of admitted applicants tell a similar story. Between 2019 and 2024, the median LSAT scores of black applicants ranged from 5 to 7 points lower than the median LSAT scores white applicants who were admitted.”

Dhillon also cited quite a lot of quota mongering by school admissions officers at their “14th Annual Diversity Admissions Office Open House” in November 2023, according to UCLA documentation of the event that the Department obtained.

She said that “At that event, UCLA Law admissions staff expressed a preference for “diverse” applicants and instructed those applicants on how to make use of their race in the application process.”

She said “it is evident that UCLA Law encourages applicants to reveal their racial background in their personal essays so that admissions staff can consider race.”

She said Admissions Dean Robert Schwartz bragged that the holistic review of applicants allows the school to enroll a “diverse” class and “implied that UCLA Law’s applications questionnaire enables admissions personnel to determine race without asking directly.”

Then-Assistant Director of Admissions Tony Tolbert even told applicants they could “reveal their race in answers to certain essay questions or by submitting a diversity statement,” explaining that, “If information about your ethnic/racial background would be helpful for schools to know to gain a better sense of who you are, include it.”

Asked about those comments, Tolbert told the California Globe that “it is not true at all” he was encouraging students to reveal their race.

He also insisted it is “simply untrue” that UCLA law school has been admitting blacks with lower LSAT scores than whites.

So it is his contention that the Justice Department was fabricating statistics?

“I’m not going to comment on any of this.”

But Equal Protection Project Founder Bill Jacobson told the California Globe that the the Justice Department has amassed considerable evidence that UCLA law school is guilty of discrimination.

“The DOJ findings are very detailed and specific alleging a scheme to evade the [Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action] both in intent and statistical effect. The reaction by UCLA as documented in the DOJ findings that the [Supreme Court] ruling would not impact UCLA admissions is something we’ve seen elsewhere,” he emailed. ‘The Equal Protection Project recently filed a Civil Rights Complaint against Bates College in Maine regarding a racial balancing STEM program where the President similarly vowed that Bates “will not allow the Court’s decision to diminish” diversity efforts. Such expressions of intended defiance by UCLA were critical to the DOJ findings, combined with the other evidence of practices of efforts to inject race into the admissions process.”

So what happens next?

“UCLA, of course, is entitled to dispute the DOJ findings, and to oppose any subsequent lawsuit should it come to that. But if what DOJ found is true, confrontation by UCLA would be a risky strategy.”

Tania Faransso, the UCLA lawyer who received the letter from Harmeet Dhillon, did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.