DEI Can Get You Killed

Insiders at UCLA’s medical school apparently have shared information with the Free Beacon that shows the destructive impact of racism–DEI–on medical schools. The story by Aaron Sibarium begins with an anecdote:

[W]hen 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.”

Racism in public school admissions was illegal in California even before the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision last year, but when have liberals ever felt obligated to follow the law?

The Beacon reports that some admissions officials were unsettled by that outburst by Lucero:

“We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants,” the official wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This is troubling.”

“I wondered,” the official added, “if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion.”

I assume that question is strictly rhetorical. But what has been the effect of lowering admission standards for favored categories of applicants?

[F]aculty 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.”

For example:

“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.”

How badly do 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.

And those people presumably are now, or soon will be, treating patients.

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.

Contemplate that: failure rates increasing by an order of magnitude due to DEI. No doubt that has to do, in part, with a “steep drop in the number of Asian matriculants.” What does that mean for future patients?

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.“

There is no doubt that the “shocking decline” in competence of medical students is caused by DEI:

“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.”

This outrageous story is being replicated across most of our educational institutions and most of our economy. In all cases, race discrimination produces worse results. And in some cases, like medical school admissions, it can get you killed.