What happens when an elite medical school makes DEI its lodestar instead of competence? As it turns out, the answer is pretty much what you’d imagine.
The Daily Caller’s Aaron Sibarium (‘A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA) does a deep dive into the changes at the elite University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine once a DEI jihadi was put in charge of the admissions process. What he discovers should scare the bejeezus out of you.
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).
Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.
So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting.
Their reservations were not well-received.
When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.
“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”
Similarly, race is used as a bludgeon against the scourge of “pale penis people.”
At a meeting in February 2022, according to two people present, Lucero demanded that a highly qualified white male be knocked down several spots because, as she put it, “we have too many of his kind” already.
While the admissions process seems to be facially illegal and, according to the post, used by Dr. Lucero as a combination of primal scream therapy and Maoist struggle session, the part of the story that concerns me is less about the byzantine admissions process at an elite medical school than about the product the school produces. An inequitable admissions process that nonetheless selects students who master course material is one thing. An inequitable process that cheats deserving applicants of a place and admits morons is something entirely different.
One of the school’s key metrics is the so-called “shelf exam.” This exam is administered to medical students at the end of their clinical rotations.
This first chart shows the pass-fail rate for classes between 2020 and 2023.
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
This year, we’ve reached full flower with 50-plus percent failure rates in emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.
And in some of the cohorts she admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics. pic.twitter.com/gkXwN4PRg2
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) May 23, 2024
We’ve all seen this movie before. If this scenario led to dismissal from the course, it would be sort of a non-problem.
One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don’t know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients.
But that’s not how things work when BigIdeas™ are challenged. Failing half the class would show the world the DEI experiment had failed, but it can’t fail. Professors will be under enormous pressure to change grades to validate the system rather than run the professional risk of being labeled as racists. I predict that shelf exam scores will have returned to pre-2020 norms within a couple of years.
The incompetents forced through training at UCLA will be turned loose on the public. And then we’ll see the downstream effects as they injure and kill patients, and the system covers for them because they are elite medical school grads, and if you think their performance sucks, it is because you don’t know great medicine and are quite possibly a bigot.
This is how institutions and professions die. As I write this, I’m watching it play out inside the Army’s officer corps. The only saving grace is that this malpractice may draw attention to and fix the problem. That, of course, is cold comfort if it is your loved one who has to die or be maimed to expose a corrupt system.
