My complaint is that med school graduates today are no longer to be relied upon, because past standards are gone.
It’s likely a white male med school graduate today is very good, because the med school held them to a near-impossible standard to beat out the black-female candidates that it preferred to accept.
30 years ago this wasn’t the case. People who didn’t like say, black doctors, were racist and ignorant of statistics.
Today those statistics have changed and it’s not racist to understand this.
This has been going on for 20 years: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120616/
Black students (among other minorities) with unacceptable MCAT (as in, if another race had them they would be rejected) are accepted, at a rate 6-10x more likely to be admitted with similar scores. The motivation is that doctors should match the demographic they treat, and minority doctors are underrepresented, so should be accepted at higher rates: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/clinical-outcomes-pa...
The obvious outcome is that minorities students, being less prepared as measured by MCAT and somewhat setup for failure, have a much higher failure rate, with black students being 85% more likely to leave medical school than white: https://news.yale.edu/2023/07/31/black-md-phd-students-exper...
USMLE scores have been changed to pass/fail, to hide the actual score, to help prevent rejection of minority students who previously would have been rejected: https://n-age.org/wp-content/uploads/A-Test-of-Diversity-—-W... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00904...
The system was, as is the stated goal by all, setup to pass minority students that would have previously been rejected, at every step of them becoming a doctor, to provide a net positive for minority populations, since it's accepted that you'll get the best outcome if your doctor is the same race as you.
1. You're free to pick the race of your doctor. Matching your race is a data driven positive.
2. 30 years ago, the system made sure a minority doctor was (at least, but probably more so do to discrimination) as competent as a white doctor. These days, the system is intentionally and deliberately set up so to help pass less competent minority students, due to the positives of #1.
It's a mushy relative thing.
"You know what they call the most unqualified insert-identity-here person in the med school class of 2025 who squeezed by because it would look bad if they didn't?"
"Dr."
Which is why 99% AI-driven diagnosis can't come fast enough.
If I had a black doctor in 1995 I guarantee that’d be the top-5% of doctors.
In 2026 that’s somebody who got into med school with 2 deviations below the other candidates, which puts me at risk as their patient.
DEI was the worst thing to happen to non-white-male doctors in the history of medicine. They can be the best clinician in the world but patients won’t trust them. I’m not even sure administrators or colleagues will either.
It put the whole system at risk.