Medical Schools Still Discriminate Based on Race

City Journal reported:

That’s my conclusion after submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to all 93 public medical schools. I asked for several years of admissions data, including on students who matriculated in 2024, following the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. I sought data on race, undergraduate grades, MCAT scores, and admission status, in order to assess whether racial disparities in admission standards persisted after the decision.

It’s reasonable to ask whether the 23 medical schools that responded to my request are indicative of all 93 public medical schools in America. The answer is likely yes. At least 34 medical schools have publicly released demographic data that broadly show little change in the racial composition of their student bodies since the Court’s ruling. At nine, the shares of “under-represented” students have actually increased. That, too, is a sign that affirmative action continues in medical education.

Why wouldn’t medical schools give up on affirmative action? Because they claim a moral imperative to discriminate by race. One of the fundamental tenets of the modern medical establishment is that black doctors are essential to treating, and even saving the lives of, black patients.

This belief compels medical schools to admit less qualified black students, but it’s factually baseless. The systematic reviews of the evidence are either deeply flawed or show no benefit to physician-patient race-matching, as a colleague and I have shown. And last year, building on our hypothesis, the Manhattan Institute debunked the foundational study that medical schools have relied on since 2020.

That study purported to show that black newborns in Florida were likelier to survive when they had black physicians—a phenomenon the authors attributed to potential “spontaneous bias” from physicians of other races. But the Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen and George Borjas found that the authors never considered a crucial variable: the newborns’ very low birth weight. Once that was accounted for, the supposed benefits of race-based care disappeared.