The UC Davis scale: When ‘race-neutral’ still involves race

When institutions choose shortcuts to racial diversity, everyone ultimately loses: the students, the profession, and the patients it serves.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the UC Davis School of Medicine. 

UC Davis has allegedly handed the US Department of Justice a near-perfect exhibit of exactly how this misguided approach plays out in practice.

School leaders allegedly created the “Davis Scale,” a scoring system that gives extra consideration to applicants from lower-income families, those whose parents had less education, and those who grew up in underserved areas.

On paper, it sounds perfectly race-neutral. In practice, as Associate Dean Mark Henderson explained with refreshing candor, it was “class-based affirmative action,” and “class struggles have a huge overlap with race — that’s how we skirted the issue.”

One almost has to admire his honesty. Most prefer to whisper such things in private emails. Here, the architect publicly appeared to describe a workaround, promoted it to other medical schools, and celebrated the results.

Internal documents and simulations suggested that UC Davis tested the scale specifically to increase black and Hispanic enrollment. Administrators allegedly tracked racial percentages like sports scores and proudly announced that “underrepresented in medicine” students had tripled, reaching levels that neatly matched California’s demographics.

When the very people who designed the tool openly appear to admit that it was built to produce the racial outcomes the Supreme Court has forbidden, their defense would seem to lose much of its rhetorical force. Intent matters.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Students for Fair Admissions decision, “what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows.”

The law looks at the reality, not the clever label.

Once you’ve told the world how you evaded the law, it becomes much harder to claim you were following it all along.

The deeper problem is not just legal evasion; it is the quiet harm done to the very students these policies claim to uplift.

Medical school is demanding. When students are admitted with noticeably weaker academic preparation — lower GPAs and MCAT scores on average — they often find themselves mismatched against classmates who arrived far better equipped. The predictable result is more academic struggle, lower performance on licensing exams, longer time to graduate, and, in too many cases, discouragement or outright failure to finish.

This “mismatch” effect is not speculation. Decades of evidence, including what happened in California after Proposition 209 banned racial preferences, show that black and Hispanic students often succeeded at higher rates when admitted to schools where their academic preparation matched the pace of their peers.

Lowering the bar does not raise people up; it simply moves the finish line, and leaves many still short of real competence. It hurts the students who struggle, the patients who deserve highly skilled doctors, and the profession’s overall standards.

There is also the subtler cost of stigma. Talented students who would have earned their place on merit find their achievements clouded by doubt — both from others and, sometimes, from themselves. The soft bigotry of lowered expectations is still bigotry, and it carries a human price.

Medicine is not a demographic balancing act. Patients of every background deserve doctors chosen for knowledge and skill. Real, lasting diversity comes from preparing underrepresented students to compete successfully at the highest levels — not from lowering standards to manufacture the desired mix.

Good intentions remain no substitute for clear thinking about consequences. True progress requires raising preparation long before students reach medical school — not inventing new ways to pretend the gaps do not exist.

True diversity in medicine is valuable. Different experiences and perspectives can strengthen the profession when they are earned through real preparation. But that kind of diversity must be built by better equipping underrepresented students to compete on equal footing — not by lowering standards or engineering racial outcomes through the back door.

Craig J. DeLuz who has over 30 years of experience in public policy and advocacy, hosts a daily news and commentary show called “The RUNDOWN”; and can be followed on X at @CraigDeLuz.