The University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen Medical School has been heavily prioritizing race in admissions while the school has fallen in rankings.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, when a Black candidate in November 2021 applied with test scores and grades well below the average for UCLA, the admissions committee expressed skepticism and argued the candidate wasn’t a good fit.
Dean of Admissions Jennifer Lucero, however, chided the committee.
”Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero said.
Lucero argued that low grades and test scores shouldn’t matter too much, adding “we need people like this in the medical school.”
While the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions in Summer 2022, California has prohibited public schools from using the practice in admissions since 1996.
”We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants,” one official wrote in an email to another committee member in response to Lucero’s comments.
”I wondered…if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion,” the official stated.
Several university officials spoke with the outlet and said Lucero “cut corners” to achieve racial diversity.
”I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything,” one admissions committee member said. “People get in and they struggle.”
Another UCLA faculty member said, “I wouldn’t normally talk to a reporter…But there’s no way to stop this without embarrassing the medical school.”
The changes in admissions have had a dramatic impact on the medical school’s overall rankings. Since Lucero was hired in 2020, UCLA has dropped in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings for medical research from 6th to 18th.
Additionally, over 50% of its students failed standardized tests on family medicine, internal medicine, emergency medicine, and pediatrics.
According to the report, those tests are normally taken at the end of clinical rotations and are important in applications to residencies. The average fail rate for those tests is 5% nationally, but at UCLA since 2020, those fail rates have increased tenfold in several subjects, according to data obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
A professor described one operating room incident, during which a student could not identify a major artery when asked. The professor says the student proceeded to become angry and yell at the professor, saying that she had been put on the spot.
”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.”
While UCLA didn’t respond to claims in the story, one member of Congress took aim at the school for bringing DEI into medicine.
”What they’re doing in our medical system is bringing DEI into it,” Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) told Campus Reform. “So now that we know we’re going to defund this mess, we just have been allowed to happen.”
