Education Department Scraps Discipline Quota Rules as DOJ Opens 15 Medical School Race Probes

The Trump administration widened its campaign against race-based decision-making in education this week, hitting two fronts at once: K-12 school discipline and medical school admissions.

On Thursday, the Department of Education rescinded regulations that had allowed schools to be found in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act based on disparate-impact statistics alone, according to the Daily Signal, which first reported the move. Disparate-impact theory holds that a race-neutral policy can still be treated as illegal discrimination if it produces different outcomes across racial groups.

Under Obama-era guidance, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights used that theory to investigate schools where Black or Hispanic students were disciplined at higher rates than white students, even when the underlying disciplinary policy applied equally to everyone.

"We should be making decisions based on meritocracy," Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey told the Daily Signal. "We should be making decisions based on qualifications. This is just one additional important step, where we are demonstrating that any inclusion of race in any decision that is made within a school has to stop."

Richey argued the old regulations backfired. "When you tell schools that they are going to be held in violation of federal civil rights laws if their data doesn't look good, if there's any discrepancy in their data, schools are going to find a way to make the data look right," she said. Her point: schools facing disparate-impact scrutiny started factoring race into individual discipline decisions to keep the numbers balanced, which she says is the opposite of what Title VI actually requires.

Civil rights advocates who supported disparate-impact enforcement did so because facially neutral rules, like zero-tolerance policies, can still be applied unevenly by individual administrators. Statistical patterns were treated as a proxy for that unevenness when individual bias is hard to prove case by case. Critics of Richey's move will say tossing the data-based check removes the only tool regulators had to catch discrimination that doesn't show up in an official policy document. Whether removing that check makes enforcement more consistent, as Richey argues, or simply harder to enforce at all, is an open question the Education Department's own reporting doesn't yet answer.

DOJ Targets Medical School Admissions

The same week, the Justice Department announced civil rights investigations into 15 medical schools over admissions practices, following up on probes into Ohio State University, Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego that were first reported in March by the New York Times, according to Higher Ed Dive.

"Many of America's top medical schools appear more concerned about the demographics of their incoming classes than training students to succeed in the profession," said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, in a statement reported by both Higher Ed Dive and the Washington Examiner.

The DOJ's announcement did not name all 15 schools or provide specific evidence of discrimination, according to the Washington Examiner. The investigations follow the DOJ's determination in May that UCLA and Yale had illegally and intentionally used race in medical school admissions, the Examiner reported.

Separately, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights opened its own probes into five specific medical schools on July 22: Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine, East Carolina University's Brody School of Medicine, St. Louis University School of Medicine, Western University of Health Sciences, and William Carey University College of Osteopathic Medicine, according to the Straits Times.

As with the DOJ probes, the Education Department's statement alleged racial discrimination in admissions but did not elaborate or provide evidence, the Straits Times reported.

East Carolina University said it complied with state and federal law and court rulings and would respond to the department accordingly. Dartmouth College said it remains confident in its admissions practices, according to the Straits Times. Neither school has been found to have violated the law.

The Legal Backdrop

All of this traces back to the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down race-conscious admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina as violations of the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI, finding the programs discriminated against white and Asian applicants, according to the Washington Examiner.

Trump built on that ruling with his April 2025 executive order, "Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy," which made it official policy to eliminate disparate-impact liability across the federal government, according to the Daily Signal.

Civil rights advocates quoted by the Straits Times argue diversity practices address historic inequities affecting women, LGBT people and ethnic minorities, and warn the broader crackdown, which also touches pro-Palestinian campus protests, transgender policies and climate programs, threatens free speech, due process and academic freedom on campus.

None of the medical schools named by the DOJ or Education Department have been charged with any violation or found liable in court. The investigations are ongoing, and the schools under review, including Dartmouth and East Carolina, say they intend to cooperate while standing by their current admissions practices. Whether the administration produces actual evidence of race-based decision-making at these specific institutions beyond the UCLA and Yale findings already announced in May will become clear as these investigations proceed.