University statistics show race preferences are still being used.
In a letter to Berkeley’s lawyer, the Justice Department says Berkeley Law violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Asian and white applicants during the 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles. Those two admissions years were after the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) that race preferences are unconstitutional.
“This discrimination is apparent from the significant disparity in objective academic metrics between racially preferred applicants, and applicants from non-preferred races,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote. In 2025 black law school applicants were 5.8 times more likely to be admitted than white applicants with comparable applications. In 2024 the black candidate was 6.5 times more likely to be admitted.
The appearance of deck-stacking gets worse with the LSAT scores. Between 2021 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of admitted applicants, disaggregated by race, hardly budged. The median Asian score was 172 in 2021 and in 2025. The median white score was 171 in 2021 and 172 in 2025. The median black score was 165.5 in 2021 and 167 in 2025.
Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has suggested schools should use proxies for race in the admissions process as well as in faculty hiring. A school could use “unstated affirmative action,” Dean Chemerinsky said, and keep quiet about it. “What if the college or university doesn’t tell anybody, doesn’t make any public statements, but still wants to do it,” he remarked about faculty hiring, according to the Justice letter.
