6/25/07 blog post
    Here is an East Asian Female med school applicant from Princeton applying to the top American MD-PhD (MSTP) programs in 2007. She had a 41 MCAT score and a 3.93 cumulative GPA from Princeton in Biological Sciences.  She was accepted at UCSF, Columbia , Cornell, Penn and NYU, but rejected by Harvard, Stanford , Washington U. at St. Louis , and the U. of Michigan Medical Schools for the MD-PhD program. She will be attending UCSF.  Click on this for the profile of the East Asian American applicant: http://mdapplicants.com/viewprofile.php?id=7606
    Compare her to the Hispanic American URM with a 31 MCAT score and a 3.83 GPA from Stanford, who was accepted by 11 schools.  Please click on: http://mdapplicants.com/viewprofile.php?id=3938 for his profile and stats to compare.  He was accepted to 11 MD-PhD programs, including Harvard, Stanford and Washington U at St. Louis , and probably would have been accepted to the 2 he withdrew from.
    The Hispanic applied in 2006 and the East Asian applied in 2007. I would say that the East Asian had to meet a higher bar for admissions in terms of her MCAT score and GPA, and even then she was rejected by Harvard and Stanford, whereas the Hispanic was admitted.
    Again, race and ethnic group preferences are evident in determining the outcomes of the applications for these two applicants to their respective MD-PhD programs. I think race based affirmative action played a significant role in the final decisions by these schools.

6/1/07 Washington Post: "At Med Schools, a New Degree of Diversity: Classes Reflect A Foreign Flavor,"
by David Brown
    The six members of Medical Team 4 have a lot in common. Each wears a white coat, has a stethoscope for a necklace and has stayed up late this week. They can all start an IV and work up a solitary lung nodule.
    They share something less obvious, too. With one exception, none has a grandparent born in the United States.
    Med 4 at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northwest Washington is the new face of American medicine. Its members happen to come from Georgetown and George Washington universities, but the team is indistinguishable from similar groups of young doctors and doctors-to-be at many of the country's 125 medical schools.
    In the past 15 years, U.S. medicine has seen a huge influx of first- and second-generation immigrants. It follows and augments a different demographic trend that began 30 years ago with the acceptance of increasing numbers of women into medical schools. As a result of that earlier revolutionary change, half of new practitioners today are women.
    The Norman Rockwell-Marcus Welby image of the American doctor -- an avuncular white man, often in a bow tie -- is rapidly disappearing.
    From 1980 to 2004, the fraction of medical school graduates describing themselves as white fell from 85 percent to 64 percent. Over that same period, the percentage of Asians increased from 3 percent to 20 percent, with Indians and Chinese the two biggest ethnic groups.
    Counted in the "white" category, moreover, are a moderate number of ethnic Persians whose families fled the 1979 Iranian revolution, and a smaller number of more recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the "black" category is an unknown number of graduates whose families recently arrived from Africa, predominantly Nigerians and Ghanaians.
    "We are seeing more and more kids of foreign-born parents, especially in the last eight to 10 years. I don't think there is any doubt about it," said Milford M. Foxwell, a physician and dean of admissions at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In his 18 years on the job, he has reviewed about 75,000 applications.
    Many forces are sketching this changing portrait of the American medical student. They include a general increase in immigration, a large influx of foreigners trained in scientific and technical professions, and a culture of educational achievement in communities of newly arrived immigrants that prepares their children for the competition and rigors of medical school.
    How -- or whether -- this trend will change the practice of medicine in this country is uncertain.
    There is a small amount of evidence that a diverse student body may be more attuned to disparities in medical care than a homogeneous one. A study published in 2004 found that black, Hispanic and Asian medical students (in descending order) are more likely than white ones to think that U.S. medicine often "treats people unfairly" based on race, ethnicity, insurance status, income or ability to speak English.
    In general, though, few are eager to touch on the implications of the new ethnic mix in medical schools. Officials at institutions as different as the University of Vermont and Howard University declined multiple requests to discuss, even anecdotally, the evolution of their student makeup.
    In the case of Med 4, its roots stretch to India (two students), Bangladesh (one), Austria (one) and Russia (one). The sole team member without a family narrative of recent arrival is African American.
    The door to the team's office at the VA hospital humorously telegraphs an awareness that the people inside the windowless warren of cubicles, computers, backpacks and water bottles are not quite a random sample of America. Someone has taped on it a page from the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.
    "Your doctor could be an alien! They're working undercover!" shouts the headline. Under it is a photo of four masked-and-gowned physicians -- one with dark space-creature eyes -- gathered around a supine patient.
    Team 4's international coloration includes even its senior physician, Divya Shroff, an assistant professor of medicine at GW.
    Her father immigrated from India to study chemical engineering in graduate school, returned to India to marry, then came back to the United States with his bride. Shroff and her younger brother and sister grew up in the Chicago suburbs but spent three years in New Delhi in the 1980s. Her brother is also a physician, her sister an investment banker.
    "We were never forced into medicine," she said recently in her office at the VA hospital. "But in the Indian community in Chicago, everyone was a professional. Everyone was a doctor or an engineer."
    She went from high school into a program at the University of Missouri where students got both a bachelor's degree and a medical degree in six years. Of the 10 people in her group, "maybe one was Caucasian," she recalled. The majority were Indians.
    The culture of high expectation holds true for another South Asian on the team, resident Moneera Haque, who grew up in Bethesda with parents who immigrated from Bangladesh.
    Haque, 30, has a doctorate in social work along with her medical degree. She recently presented a paper on "racial differences in utilization of cardiac rehabilitation" at a scientific meeting in New Orleans and another paper at a conference in Amsterdam. Her brother is a neurosurgeon.
    In her household, the notion that education came first "was simply the way things were," Haque said while sipping a drink in a break room. "For me, that didn't seem like pressure." But she admitted she wasn't studying just for herself: "We have a sense of obligation to our parents to help them fulfill their dreams as well."
    Alexandra Langer, a third-year medical student at GW, traced a distinctly different path.
    Langer, 30, grew up in Yekaterinburg, in central Russia. Her father managed a pension fund, and her mother was a police officer. As a high school student, she aspired to become a doctor, but her parents talked her out of it.
    "In Russia, doctors are much lower status than here," she said. "And they are very low-paid."
    So at 18 she left home and moved to Prague, where she studied Czech, English and international relations, but she never really gave up her original idea. She married an American, moved to the United States, graduated from college in North Carolina and got into medical school.
    "It seems like a very, very long time," she said. "But it's worth it."
    Although the Association of American Medical Colleges asks all medical school applicants and matriculants to describe their race and ethnicity in general terms, there is little published information about national background and none about family history. Anecdotes, however, suggest that immigrants' children are more likely to attend schools on both coasts.
    S. Balasubramaniam, a surgeon at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles who emigrated from India in 1971, recently queried 50 medical schools and calculated that 12 percent of the class that entered in 2006 is of Indian heritage. The highest percentages are in California, Texas, New York, New Jersey and New England.
    Na Shen, 25, a second-year medical student at Maryland who was born in Shanghai, calculated that 12 percent of her school's students are from China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, and 1 percent from Southeast Asia. When South Asians are included, the Asian portion of the school rises to 21 percent.
    In contrast, University of Kansas medical school students since 1996 have consistently run about 10 percent "either born overseas or of parents who were born overseas," said Glendon Cox, the vice dean.
    The most recent arrivals -- Africans -- are the hardest to quantify.
    Morehouse School of Medicine, in Atlanta, has 12 students born in Africa out of about 210 in the M.D. program. Meharry Medical College, another historically black institution, in the past eight years has had an average of two foreigners per year in its incoming classes of about 60. It has no data, however, on students with recent ties to Africa who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Howard, the third historically black medical school, did not provide information when asked.
    A half-dozen people at the Student National Medical Association -- the main U.S. organization of black medical students -- did not respond to inquiries.
    Lauree Thomas, an African American physician who is associate dean for admissions at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, estimated that "20 to 30 percent of the black applicant pool" at her school is students who were born in Nigeria, or of Nigerian parents. Foxwell, the Maryland dean, estimates that close to half the black students there have recent ties to Africa.
    This is a touchy subject in the black medical community.
    Albert Morris Jr., a diagnostic radiologist in Memphis who is president of the predominantly black National Medical Association, said he recently talked to black students at Pennsylvania State University's medical school in Hershey. Afterward, several took him aside and quietly complained about the rising number of Africans.
    "It was a big topic -- that people were coming in and getting slots that they thought should be going to African Americans," he recalled.
    Blacks constitute about 13 percent of the U.S. population, but only 4 percent of U.S. doctors. There has been much effort in the last two decades to remedy this imbalance. Morris, a graduate of Howard, said he understands the students' sensitivities.
    "We are happy to see doctors who are ready to treat minority populations, no matter their nationality," said Morris, 56. "But we want to make sure that those of us who have helped open the doors [to medical school for blacks] get to share in the bounty."

3/21/2006 Harvard Crimson: “ Harvard Medical School Amends Admit Policy.  Worried that practice was unconstitutional, school nixes panel vetting minorities
By Lawrence Holland
    In a move that brings its admissions policies in line with the rest of the University, Harvard Medical School (HMS) will eliminate an admissions subcommittee dedicated to applicants from “under-represented minorities” next year, according to HMS administrators.
    The announcement comes a week after HMS sent out admissions decisions to its incoming Class of 2010, and almost three years after the Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan ’s point-based undergraduate admissions policy in the cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.
    HMS officials acknowledged that the policy shift came in response to fears that their system could be viewed as unconstitutional.
    “It’s well-intentioned, but we’ve been told repeatedly by the University counsel and consultants for the University counsel that it is not a wise policy to maintain,” said Dr. Robert J. Mayer, faculty associate dean for admissions at HMS, yesterday.
    Since the landmark 1978 Bakke Supreme Court decision that barred universities from using quota systems, HMS has used a two-tiered system in which applications from under-represented minorities—defined as African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans—are evaluated by a dedicated subcommittee before being pooled with the rest of the applicants for a final decision, according to Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, HMS associate dean for student affairs.
    According to Mayer, HMS started to review its affirmative action policy in late 2004.
    Under the new system, minority applications will simply be flagged to ensure that at least one minority admissions officer evaluates the application and interviews the applicant, Poussaint said in an interview last Friday.
    “We stood out, in a sense, as a contrast to Harvard College , the Law School , the Business School , and all the other medical schools in the country,” Mayer said. “It’s an internal adjustment in the way that the process takes place, so as not to make the Medical School and the University in general vulnerable to any outside forces.”
    Poussaint cited the language of the Gratz v. Bollinger decision, which called for “holistic” affirmative action policies, saying that administrators “thought it would look more holistic if minority groups were spread over all the subcommittees.”
    “They didn’t want to give any appearance of doing something different that was in some way limited to minorities,” Poussaint said.
    Mayer added that the change in the admissions process did not indicate a reduced commitment to diversity.
    “There is absolutely no change in our commitment to diversity,” Mayer said. “If anything, it enhances the commitment to under-represented minorities.”
    In his interview with The Crimson yesterday, Mayer also released statistics on the incoming Class of 2010, the last HMS class to be admitted under the old affirmative action policy.
    According to Mayer, the acceptance rate at HMS remained steady this year at 4.2 percent. The school remains at the top of many students’ wish lists: Mayer said that the school’s haul of 4,683 applications meant that one of every seven medical school applicants in the country applied to Harvard. Minority applications were down slightly, but both Mayer and Poussaint said that the drop was well within standard deviations.

12/19/01: According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, Asian-Americans are not minorities.  "You are eligible for Med-MAR if you meet the following criteria: You are a U.S. citizen or Permanent Resident Visa holder and you are a member of a group currently under- represented in medicine (Black American, American Indian, Mexican American, Mainland Puerto Rican, and/or low-income individual)".  Therefore, when they want to implement affirmative action, they want to engage in reverse discrimination against Asian-Americans.  http://www.aamc.org/students/minorities/start.htm http://www.aamc.org/students/minorities/resources/medmar.htm 

Asian-Americans are the most qualified but have the lowest chance of admission to medical school than any other racial or ethnic group.  See Center for Equal Opportunity and click on
1. Preferences in Medical Education: Racial and Ethnic Preferences at Five Public Medical Schools, and 
2. Racial and Ethnic Preferences and Consequences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  
6/21/01 http://www.jewishworldreview.com: "Affirmative action doctors can kill you," by Linda Chavez, Center For Equal Opportunity -- 
    The American Medical Association meets this week in Chicago for its annual conference, and there will be plenty of controversial public policy issues on its agenda. But one issue you can bet the AMA won't talk about is what effect the widespread practice of admitting blacks and Hispanics to medical school with lower qualifications than their white and Asian counterparts is having on the medical profession. 
    By now, most Americans have gotten used to the idea that colleges and universities apply double standards when it comes to admitting black and Hispanic undergraduates -- even if they don't like it very much. The assumption has been, however, that these students somehow catch up over the next four years and go on to be just as successful as their white and Asian peers.
    This notion was given a boost a few years ago when two influential former college presidents, William Bowen and Derek Bok, published the findings of a study on affirmative action, "The Shape of the River," in which they claimed that minority students who benefited from preferential admissions standards nonetheless went on to perform well, earning graduate degrees at higher numbers than might be expected. 
    What Bowen and Bok didn't say is that the same degree of racial preference being given to minority students at the undergraduate level applies to graduate schools, too, including medical schools. 
    For the first time ever, we now have the hard numbers to prove that medical schools routinely give preference to less-qualified black (and sometimes Hispanic) applicants than to others. 
    The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), which I head, has been studying the issue of racial preferences in college admissions for the past six years. 
    We've now turned our focus to medical schools and are in the process of gathering information on every public school of medicine in the country. So far, we've analyzed six medical schools, representing every geographic region of the country, and the pattern for medical schools is the same as it was for undergraduate institutions. 
    Black and Hispanic students are being admitted to medical school with substantially lower college grades and test scores than whites or Asians. If you're a black or, to a lesser degree, Hispanic applicant, your chances of being admitted to medical school are far greater than whites or Asians with the same college grades and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores. 
    At the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1997, the odds ratio of a black applicant being admitted over a white with the same grades and MCAT scores were nearly 30-to-1.  At the State University of New York, Brooklyn, the odds were nearly 23-to-1 in 1996 and were 9-to-1 in 1999. At the University of Maryland in 1999, they were 21-to-1, and at the University of Georgia in 1996, they were 19-to-1. At Michigan State University College of Human Medicine they were 12-to-1 in 1997 and 14-to-1 in 1999. 
    But more disturbing even than the finding that medical schools seem to be admitting less-qualified students on the basis of race and ethnicity is that many of these students can't pass their licensing exams, despite greater resources directed toward helping them than other students received. 
    At every medical school CEO studied, substantially larger numbers of black students than whites either did not take or failed their initial licensing exams, and, in most instances, failed their subsequent licensing tests as well. These higher failure rates don't just mean personal disappointment. Since medical education requires a huge allocation of resources -- and at state schools, this usually means tax-payer funding -- medical students who do not go on to become doctors are a poor investment. 
    More than 3,500 white and Asian students were not admitted to the schools CEO studied, despite having better grades and test scores than black and Hispanic applicants who were given preferential treatment. Since grades and, in particular, MCAT scores are very good predictors of performance on the licensing exams, we know that a higher percentage of these students would have passed the exams if they had been admitted. 
    So, who wins? Certainly not the whites and Asians denied the opportunity to study medicine. But neither do the blacks and Hispanics who were admitted to medical school but could not survive there. 
    And all of the rest of us -- of all colors -- suffer, too, from a shortage of qualified doctors.

3/23/2001 Boston Globe: "Race a focus in med-school matches,"          
    In surveys, minority medical students are three times more likely than whites to say their goal is to serve poor communities, which may make them less likely to stay on at medical schools and teaching hospitals where they could mentor students and help ensure that minority patients are treated fairly. 
    The problem was on the agenda yesterday as 23,981 medical students across the country and around the world ripped open envelopes to find out their assignments to internships, the first and most grueling year of medical apprenticeship.  The results also looked good to Dr. Nancy Oriol, associate dean for student affairs, one of several administrators who are making minority faculty recruitment a top priority: 51% of this year's minority graduates will go on to Harvard-affiliated hospitals such as Beth Israel Deaconess, up from 10% last year.
    A lot of the Harvard hospitals made an effort to woo minority graduates this year. The Association of American Medical Colleges, which runs the Match Day program, does not keep track of race in the process, so there are no national statistics on how many black, Hispanic, and American Indian students - those designated underrepresented by medical schools - get their first choice. 
    But the AAMC, too, has raised concerns, publishing a study last year that found minority faculty advanced at slower rates and prompting an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association calling on schools to recruit more aggressively and make faculty positions more inviting for minority doctors, in part by placing more value on research and clinical work focused on underserved patients. 

"Group accuses [University of Maryland] medical school of showing favoritism toward blacks," 4/4/01 Baltimore Sun.  The University of Maryland School of Medicine admits that it favors African-Americans in its admission process.  A black applicant in 1999 was 21 times more likely to be accepted than a white applicant with the same credentials, according to the Center for Equal Opportunity ("CEO"), headed by Linda Chavez,  President Bush's first choice for labor secretary.  The CEO report about the medical school in Baltimore showed that the scores on the MCAT - the medical school equivalent of the SAT - of the 25th and 75th percentiles of black applicants were 36 and 44.  Similar scores for white applicants were 45 and 52.  Francis Canavan, associate vice chancellor for the University System of Maryland, said he did not question the report's data. "The university does take race into account in the admission process as one of many factors in meeting its responsibility to provide equal opportunities to historically underrepresented groups," he said.  The medical school is being sued by a white applicant, Robert Farmer, who claims he was discriminated against when he was denied admission in 1996.  The state claims that he would not have been admitted under any circumstances. 

"Promotion of minorities at medical school is at issue in study,"  9/6/2000 Boston Globe, p. A3.  For complete article, search Boston Globe Archives

3/00 La Griffe du Lion: "Standardized Tests: The Interpretation of Racial and
Ethnic Gaps," http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm

2/00 La Griffe du Lion: "The Death of Meritocracy,"  Statistics on how UCLA medicals school engages in reverse discrimination against Asian Americans.  http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/prop209.htm