Medical Schools Still Discriminate Based on Race

Two years after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action, many public medical schools appear to be ignoring the ruling. Admissions data from 23 schools show that black applicants are being accepted with significantly lower MCAT scores than white and Asian students.

This pattern suggests racial preferences are still in use, despite the Court’s decision. Schools often justify it by claiming diversity improves care for black patients—a claim not supported by solid evidence.

City Journal reported:

That’s my conclusion after submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to all 93 public medical schools. I asked for several years of admissions data, including on students who matriculated in 2024, following the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. I sought data on race, undergraduate grades, MCAT scores, and admission status, in order to assess whether racial disparities in admission standards persisted after the decision.

Twenty-three medical schools have answered my request, including flagship institutions in states like Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Mexico, and Colorado. The data they provided make it clear that schools are at least skirting the Supreme Court’s decision, if not violating it outright.

Accepted black applicants had lower average MCAT scores than accepted white or Asian students at all but one school, Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Thirteen schools accepted black students with average MCAT scores lower than the score of the average rejected Asian or white applicant. That suggests black applicants receive significant preferential treatment.

In fact, at two schools—Eastern Virginia Medical School and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health—black applicants were about ten times likelier to be accepted than were Asian and white applicants with similar grades and test scores. And Asian students face a conspicuously difficult road to acceptance, despite significantly better credentials on average. At Eastern Virginia, only 3 percent of Asian applicants were admitted in 2024, compared with 11 percent of blacks. At Wisconsin, the divide was even starker: 15 percent of black applicants were admitted, but only 2 percent of Asians were. The rejected Asian students had an MCAT score about 17 percentage points higher than accepted black students, on average.

It’s reasonable to ask whether the 23 medical schools that responded to my request are indicative of all 93 public medical schools in America. The answer is likely yes. At least 34 medical schools have publicly released demographic data that broadly show little change in the racial composition of their student bodies since the Court’s ruling. At nine, the shares of “under-represented” students have actually increased. That, too, is a sign that affirmative action continues in medical education.

Why wouldn’t medical schools give up on affirmative action? Because they claim a moral imperative to discriminate by race. One of the fundamental tenets of the modern medical establishment is that black doctors are essential to treating, and even saving the lives of, black patients.

This belief compels medical schools to admit less qualified black students, but it’s factually baseless. The systematic reviews of the evidence are either deeply flawed or show no benefit to physician-patient race-matching, as a colleague and I have shown. And last year, building on our hypothesis, the Manhattan Institute debunked the foundational study that medical schools have relied on since 2020.

That study purported to show that black newborns in Florida were likelier to survive when they had black physicians—a phenomenon the authors attributed to potential “spontaneous bias” from physicians of other races. But the Manhattan Institute’s Robert VerBruggen and George Borjas found that the authors never considered a crucial variable: the newborns’ very low birth weight. Once that was accounted for, the supposed benefits of race-based care disappeared.

The evidence hasn’t stopped medical schools from producing results that look like racial discrimination. The Trump administration should immediately investigate every medical school to stop potential violations of federal civil rights laws. States should enact legislation requiring admissions transparency and specific standards at taxpayer-funded schools. That could include mandatory admission for applicants who clear a specific bar on MCAT tests, forcing schools to set the bar high.