Yale University Medical School is just the latest academic culprit found to be in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While Democrats run around screaming "racism" about damn-near everything, they're super okay with having universities—and their medical schools—discriminating against white and Asian students. The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in academic admissions in 2024, but so many of these schools are still doing it. Test scores and competency, not race, should be the deciding factor in med school admissions.
While it's one thing to push people to the front of the line based on race in fields such as gender studies or basket weaving, when it comes to medicine, diversity prioritization puts the lives and health of Americans at risk. If you've been wondering why your medical care seems to have been degrading over the past few years, if you're wondering why so many rich people seem to be employing concierge doctors, affirmative action in medical school admissions could be part of the problem.
After the Supreme Court ruling, admissions departments took on new, "holistic" approaches to admissions, but really the practices and standards are ways to ascertain an applicant's race without asking them to check a box. These are workarounds to attain the same result of pushing more unqualified applicants to the front of the queue because admissions officials prefer the race of those applicants over the ones they leave behind. Hispanic and black applicants with lower test scores got into Yale even as their white and Asian counterparts did not.
Department of Justice Civil Rights Attorney Harmeet Dhillon said that "At Yale Medical School, a black applicant is 29 times more likely to be invited to interview than an Asian with equally strong academics." Her division also recently found that UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine discriminated against white and Asian students in admissions. If it's happening at Yale and UCLA, two prestigious medical schools on either side of the country, then it's likely happening at the majority of medical schools in the country—and it's been happening for some time.
Politicians have told Americans for years that diversity is a strength in its own right, that policies that achieve a diverse outcome are necessarily better than policies that don't. In 2024, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at universities, finding that it discriminated against white and Asian applicants, then-President Joe Biden spoke out against it.
After the Supreme Court ruling, he said, "I know today's court decision is a severe disappointment to so many people, including me. But we cannot let the decision be a permanent setback for the country. We need to keep an open door of opportunities. We need to remember that diversity is our strength. We need to find a way forward. We need to remember that the promise of America is big enough for everyone to succeed. That's the work of my administration."
We Americans were sold on this absurd, racist idea that diversity in and of itself, for its own sake, is a strength and will produce better outcomes. But that's just not true. Merit-based admissions produce the best outcomes, even if it doesn't produce the most diverse outcomes. Would you rather see a Benetton ad when you're rolled into the ER suffering a stroke, or would you rather have the absolute best doctors available to treat you?
"Yale’s documents show that its leadership intentionally selected applicants based on their race," the DOJ states. "Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students. Yale’s admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores."
Dhillon said: "Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform. This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law."
I'm not in favor of affirmative action at any university or institution, but in the case of medical schools, the practice is perilous. A finding in 2024 discovered that prioritizing diversity over merit resulted in "unqualified" graduates, students who could not pass medical exams to become doctors even after the school's rigorous academic programs. UCLA was called a "failed medical school" by members of the admissions staff.
This isn't about diversity, it's about American healthcare, which has been a gold standard globally, with people bringing their toughest cases to the US for treatment. When my son was in need of serious, terrifying surgery during his first year of life, I was able to access the best, worldwide, medical care here in the US. When we say that our doctors don't have to be good enough, don't have to be the top in their fields, don't have to come from the best the applicant pool has to offer, we are telling Americans that their health just isn't that important.
It's not the color of my doctor's skin that matters, nor the content of their character, it's their ability to wield a scalpel, diagnose a condition, identify cancer, and treat my ills that is foremost in my mind. We don't need doctors who look like a Benetton ad, we don't need doctors who pass the rigorous, "holistic" admissions standards, we need doctors who can practice medicine better than anyone else.
In their finding, the DOJ said that Yale was in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it employed the practice of "discriminating on the basis of race in the incoming class of 2023, 2024, and 2025. Based on its review of Yale's documents and data, the Department finds that Yale continues to intentionally discriminate against applicants based on their race after the Supreme Court's decision in Harvard by granting and denying admission on the basis of race."
This delusion that diversity is itself the end goal, under which we have all been laboring for decades, has got to come to an end. Excellence is the goal, not diverse outcomes. Higher levels of competency must be the outcome, not a variety of skin tones. The absolute single most important criterion that should be used in medical school admissions should be whether or not the applicant will excel in the field of medicine, save lives, advance research, and care for patients. Nothing else even matters a little teeny bit at all.
