The Intersectionality Of UCLA Medical School And DEI

From "'A Failed Medical School': How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA" (h/t Instapundit). The article begins by noting:

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Sounds great. Except that for the last several years they have been making exceptions for minority students in order to increase the diversity of their student body and better represent underserved communities. So, now:

    Within three years of  [the dean of admissions, Jennifer] 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.

    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.

As one UCLA medical school official put it, "'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."

Of course our liberal "Karen," Ms. Lucero, is not helping any of the people she supposedly wants to help. The medical students are being forced to repeat classes or rotations, can't pass tests necessary to obtain residencies, and some have probably have been forced to drop out. But at least UCLA got its money, and Lucero can feel better about herself, which is all that really matters.