Everything falls before the almighty DEI deity. It’s more important that doctors fit the proper woke demographics than that they be competent, although I don’t think the public was consulted on the question:
Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).
Sounds good. But that’s the median. This is the reality:
In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.
[Since the advent in 2020 of Dean of Admissions Jennifer Lucero] Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”
This story is based on written correspondence between UCLA officials, internal data on student performance, and interviews with eight professors at the medical school—six of whom have worked with or under Lucero on medical student and residency admissions.
I find over and over that year 2020 keeps coming up in terms of the explosion of DEI domination in so many institutions, universities prominent among them, although the trend had been going on already for many years, of course.
In the article, Lucero is quoted as saying, during the admissions process involving a black female candidate whose grades were substandard: “Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” and that therefore “we need people like this in the medical school.”
That sort of thinking reduces everything to group identity. If black women’s health is particularly compromised, what they really need i is a black woman doctor even if she’s inferior as a doctor. Everything is race and sex and groups, and meritocracy is a bad word. However, I bet if Lucero did a survey of black women and asked them which they’d prefer, the best doctor or a doctor that might not be so good but who would match them in race and sex, they’d answer they wanted the best doctor.
What’s more, are black women dying at a higher rate than everyone else? Of course not. See Figure 2, the chart there on death rates , race, and sex, and you immediately see that the death rate for black males is the highest. I’m going to assume that violent death is a big part of that. Black females have death rates that are significantly lower, and in fact their rates of death are lower than that of white males. Hmmm; I doubt Lucero will be advocating for more white males in medical school as a result.
And then there’s this:
UCLA medical school hired a new dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, In 2020. Since then, the number of students failing their shelf exams—standardized tests taken after each clinical rotation—has exploded, rising as much as tenfold in some subjects.
That wasn't a coincidence. pic.twitter.com/tLJZCqZAQf
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) May 23, 2024