Reply to Some facts about Holistic Admissions Criteria from Stanford Daily

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]“I got into medical school because I said I was black,” Chokal-Ingam writes at his blog Almost Black. “The funny thing is I’m not. . . . My plan actually worked. Lucky for you, I never became a doctor.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416473/smash-bamboo-ceiling-racial-quotas-john-fund[/quote]

OMG.  Not this again.  He got into ONE medical school as a Black man, a school to which he didn't apply the first time around and in a totally different admissions cycle.

[/quote]

He says as an Indian, his chances of admission were about 17%. As a black man, those odds jumped to 79%[/quote]

Here's the relevant piece:

"He soon won interviews at Harvard and Columbia and a spot on waiting lists at the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University, and Mt. Sinai. He eventually went to Saint Louis University Medical School but dropped out after two years."

He got waitlisted at some good schools but didn't get in.  So, yes, maybe being "Black" got him an interview that he wouldn't have gotten as an Indian.  But it didn't win him acceptance.

But even if it were true that it's easier to get into medical school as a Black man, I'm 100% fine with that.  Black men and women have some of the lowest life expectancies in the country, much of that due to untreated chronic conditions.  In addition to healthcare reform, we also need more African American doctors to work in Black communities, and Latino doctors in Latino communities.

In fact, medical school is one of the professional programs in which I think affirmative action is the most defensible, given the realities of where people choose to work and the degree to which marginalized communities are more likely to seek medical care from people who share their cultural/racial background.  Right now, about 4% of US doctors identify as Black, compared to 13% of the US population.  On the other hand, about 18% of doctors are Asian, compared to about 5% of the US population.

This is a great paper by the AAMC about the issue of racial diversity in medicine and the positive impact of having more African American and Latino doctors: https://www.aamc.org/download/87306/data/physiciandiversityfacts.pdf[/quote]

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