Thanks to supposedly illegal racial preferences, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine has become a “failed medical school,” with “a third to a half of” students “incredibly unqualified,” according to insiders interviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
“We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it,” lamented one former admissions staffer.
Much of that corner-cutting is the work of dean of admissions Jennifer Lucero, reported Aaron Sibarium:
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.”
For example, when members of the admissions committee expressed reservations about a black applicant with low grades and standardized-test scores, Lucero “exploded in anger,” two people present at the meeting told Sibarium.
“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”
The internal contradictions of such thinking are obvious. On the one hand, black women are dying and, apparently, can only be treated by physicians of similar pigmentation. On the other, let’s produce black doctors who, when these women seek their help, are incapable of treating them effectively — while, mind you, rejecting white and, especially, Asian applicants who might be able to save their lives.
California outlawed racial preferences at public universities in 1996, and the Supreme Court declared a nationwide ban on them last year. But they are alive and well at UCLA and, most likely, many other schools.
Of course, administrators such as Lucero, who was hired in 2020, are careful not to use language at which courts might look askance, noted Sibarium:
Lucero has told the admissions committee that each class should “represent” the “diversity” of California, including its remote and rural areas, so that graduating students will return to their hometowns and beef up the medical infrastructure there, officials say.
Race is rarely mentioned outright, and … the committee for students does not see the race or ethnicity of applicants.
Instead, officials say, Lucero uses proxies like zip codes and euphemisms like “disadvantaged” to shut down criticism of unqualified candidates.
And woe to anyone who dissents: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”
The upshot of this approach is that UCLA’s medical school is fast losing its luster. During Lucero’s first three years on the job, the school fell from sixth to 18th place on U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of best medical schools for research.
Meanwhile, penned Sibarium, student performance among the classes she admitted has plummeted:
One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don’t know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients.
“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.”
Students take standardized tests, known as shelf exams, on basic medical knowledge at the end of each clinical rotation. “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,” wrote Sibarium. “In some of the cohorts [Lucero] admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed” them.
“UCLA still produces some very good graduates,” one professor said. “But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”
Not all the blame lies with the admissions process. Four years ago, UCLA condensed its preclinical curriculum from two years to one and, worse still, loaded it up with social-justice courses such as “Structural Racism and Health Equity,” in which “students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts,” The New American reported in January.
“This has been a colossal failure,” one anonymous UCLA professor recently wrote in an online forum for medical-school applicants. “The new curriculum is not working and the students are grossly unprepared for clinical rotations.”
“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything,” a member of the admissions committee told Sibarium. “People get in and they struggle.”
If faculty and staff recognize there’s a problem, why don’t they take it up with the people in charge rather than air their dirty scrubs in the media? Perhaps it’s because, according to Sibarium, although UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office “has received several complaints about” Lucero, “the office has declined to act on those complaints on the grounds that they aren’t ‘serious enough’ to merit an investigation.”
“I wouldn’t normally talk to a reporter,” a UCLA faculty member told Sibarium. “But there’s no way to stop this without embarrassing the medical school.”
