Instapundit linked to this article, but in case you missed it ...
/
diversity r us at ucla
Looking for a doctor? Choose an Asian, or a white, but otherwise, especially if the physician in question trained at UCLA, the odds of competence are dead set against you. Before you accuse me of racial discrimination, consider: isn’t that exactly what this school is doing?
A Failed Medical School': How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA
Up to half of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competence. Whistleblowers say affirmative action, illegal in California since 1996, is to blame.
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).
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."
>>>>
Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. 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.
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."
>>>>>
"I have students on their rotation who don't know anything," a member of the admissions committee told the Free Beacon. "People get in and they struggle."
>>>>>
Within three years of Lucero's hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report's rankings for medical research. 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.
Those tests, known as shelf exams, which are typically taken at the end of each clinical rotation, measure basic medical knowledge and play a pivotal role in residency applications. Though only 5 percent of students fail each test nationally, the rates are much higher at UCLA, having increased tenfold in some subjects since 2020, according to internal data obtained by the Free Beacon.That uptick coincided with aThat uptick coincided with a steep drop in the number of Asian matriculants and tracks the subjective impressions of faculty who say that students have never been more poorly prepared.
>>>>
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.
"I don't know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors," the professor said. "Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students."
And for those who've seen the competency crisis up close, double standards in admissions are a big part of the problem. "All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races," an admissions officer said. "For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded."
Led by Lucero, who also serves as the vice chair for equity, diversity, and inclusion of UCLA's anesthesiology department, the admissions committee routinely gives black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics, four people who served on it said, while whites and Asians need near perfect scores to even be considered.
The bar for underrepresented minorities is "as low as you could possibly imagine," one committee member told the Free Beacon. "It completely disregards grades and achievements."
Several officials said that they support holistic admissions and don't believe test scores should be judged in isolation. The problem, as they see it, is that the committee is not just weighing academic merit against community service or considering how much time a given student had to study for the MCAT. For certain applicants, they say, hardship and community service seem to be the only things that matter to the majority of the committee's 20-30 members, many of whom were handpicked by Lucero, according to people familiar with the selection process.
"We were always outnumbered," an admissions officer told the Free Beacon, referring to committee members who expressed concern about low grades. "Other people would get upset when we brought up GPA."
Lucero hasn't been kind to dissenters. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who've worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.
>>>>
After a Native American applicant was rejected in 2021, for example, Lucero chewed out the committee and made members sit through a two-hour lecture on Native history delivered by her own sister, according to three people familiar with the incident. No applications were reviewed that day, an official present for the lecture said.
In the anesthesiology department, where Lucero helps rank applicants to the department's residency program, she has rebuffed calls to blind the race of candidates, telling colleagues in a January 2023 email that, despite California's ban on racial preferences, "we are not required to blind any information."
>>>>
The focus on racial diversity has coincided with a dramatic shift in the racial and ethnic composition of the medical school, where the number of Asian matriculants fell by almost a third between 2019 and 2022, according to publicly available data. No other elite medical school in California saw a similar decline.
"It's a combination of a bad curriculum and bad selection," another professor said, referring to the admissions process. Some students are accepted with GPAs so low "they shouldn't even be applying."
>>>>>
Lucero uses proxies like zip codes and euphemisms like "disadvantaged" to shut down criticism of unqualified candidates, citing a finding from the Association of American Medical Colleges that, technically, most students with below-average MCATs make it to their second year of medical school. How well they do after that point goes undiscussed and undisclosed.
"We have asked for metrics on how these folks actually do," one committee member said. "None of that is ever divulged to us."
>>>>
“Within three years of Lucero’s hiring in 2020, UCLA dropped from 6th to 18th place in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings for medical research. 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.”
(FWIW): "I don't know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors," the professor said. That’s easy: all hospitals have DEI departments now, just as medical schools do, and these graduates will be hired, in the place of competent ones. Alternatively, and if the proponents of DIE are correct and these minority students will end up in minority neighborhoods, maybe the usual pattern will triumph: the liberals will achieve their own goal, and the poor will pay the price.
