Medical Schools Have Been Trying to Use DEI to Solve a Much Bigger Problem
“If the goal is to evaluate whether admissions reflect equal standards, the relevant comparison is not the population at large but the pool of students academically prepared to succeed in elite medical training.”
Medical schools are trying to ensure that the student body reflects society for the sake of equity, but the issues begin long before anyone applies.
From City Journal:
The “Pipeline” Problem That Medical Schools Don’t Want to Discuss
The U.S. Department of Justice’s recent finding that Yale School of Medicine discriminated on the basis of race in admissions has reignited one of the most contentious debates in higher education. According to the DOJ, black and Hispanic applicants admitted to Yale had substantially lower median MCAT scores and GPAs than white and Asian applicants across multiple admissions cycles, with the department concluding that equally qualified black applicants had dramatically higher odds of receiving interview invitations than comparable Asian applicants.
The finding comes on the heels of an earlier DOJ determination that David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA likewise engaged in racial discrimination in admissions, admitting black and Hispanic applicants with substantially lower academic credentials than their white and Asian peers.
For DEI critics, the Justice Department’s investigation provides confirmation that elite universities have continued racial preferences despite formal legal prohibitions. Admissions officers and other college officials argue that the Trump administration is leveraging civil rights law against diversity initiatives and misunderstanding the role of holistic admissions.
But beneath the legal and political fight lies a more fundamental question, one that receives surprisingly little attention: What is the proper way to evaluate disparities?
For decades, universities have treated demographic disparities in outcomes as self-explanatory. If black Americans make up roughly 14 percent of the total population but only about 6 percent of physicians, the observed difference is taken as evidence of wrongful underrepresentation—discrimination, in other words.
But medical schools don’t select students from the general population. They choose from a narrow, highly filtered pool of applicants who have demonstrated sustained excellence in challenging scientific coursework over many years. If the goal is to evaluate whether admissions reflect equal standards, the relevant comparison is not the population at large but the pool of students academically prepared to succeed in elite medical training.
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and thats why they lower the standards
if they lowered the basketball goal posts so that little people could dunk you’d hear the cries of racism etc etc
but we could claim equity !!!
the gop is lameass and wont take on these problems so the middle class wht people suffer
I hate to harp on this, but the glaring example is UCLA Geffen Medical School. At the insistence of Associate Dean for Admissions Jennifer Lucero, the admissions policies were changed to shamelessly discriminate against more qualified candidates to push a more rabid version of a DEI agenda. The results were palpable: a) a well-documented decrease in the pass rates on the USMLE Levels 1 & 2 in for their student population; b) the profession itself expressing alarm at the decrease in quality of the graduates of Geffen; and c) the number of students earning failing grades on UCLA’s own post-rotation “shelf exams” (documented in Aaron Sibarium’s Free Beacon article in 2024) which are used to judge how students themselves are integrating lecture material with actual patients in the clinic. Those three factors are the result of loosening admissions standards, and this is what those of us who teach in the residency and fellowship programs deal with, namely unprepared new “physicians” that even the patients recoil at seeing.
“he relevant comparison is not the population at large but the pool of students academically prepared to succeed in elite medical training.”
But what are their plans to address the under-representation of meth-heads, dropouts, gang members, and the homeless?
Some of these students should never be allowed to practice medicine. I have dealt with a situation in which a student at a ‘good’ medical school had a limited math preparation. They called my department to find a tutor. I am not talking calculus or statistics, The student needed tutoring in fractions and decimals. Imagine that student writing prescriptions.
If you want to get REALLY concerned, our group of volunteer NRA pistol instructors were tasked with training the “hard cases” drawing current paychecks from two of the local police departments — the ones the “professional LE instructors” had given up on, and who could barely get on the paper of 2ft² rifle targets at 30 feet. The cumulative technique and safety awareness of this crowd was nothing short of terrifying. But during the daytime hours, they were still working your neighborhood streets.
At least you can choose the doctor you go to.
You don’t always get to choose your doctor. When I had knee replacement surgery I met the assigned anesthesiologist shortly before the surgery. I have no idea of this doctor’s qualifications and don’t even remember his name.
Medical services have been declining for decades, due to multiple factors beyond DEI. The main reason things have deteriorated is the money, of course. Treatment has generally become far more effective, but also created a cutting edge that is far more expensive. And the market relentlessly promotes more expensive as better. So as our population of aged has surged, the government has increasingly taken over the messy job of distributing these costly resources in a manner that primarily benefits the politicians, rather than the overall population. Cost cutting has fueled widespread adoption of a variety of “efficiencies”, including the transfer of medical decision making down to less competent but initially less expensive pseudo physician “Healthcare Providers”, increasing the volume of encounters to compensate for declining reimbursement, and increasing use of AI facilitated checklist driven “evidence based” treatment planning that is both impersonal and inflexible. So adding the DEI driven dysfunction is just adding insult to injury.
Comparing applicants like these medical schools do is like comparing NFL players’ race statistics against the general population.
Anybody with one eye and half sense can plainly see what’s going on with this DEI crap. The problem is that most of us can do absolutely nothing about the situation. EPP is actually doing something about it. My hat is off to EPP.