MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[Derec]

I’m not displeased with the current system except that higher education is far too expensive and too many are extremely overburdened by education debt, and too many are discouraged from pursuing advanced and professional degrees.

While I understand that higher education has become very expensive, I do not see that discouraging too many people. Number of applicants is ~2x the number of US MD and DO seats and more people are applying. If even more people applied, it would be overall even more difficult to get into med school.

I don’t have any issue with med schools using the MCAT or with USMLE.

But you still want blacks and Hispanics to be accepted with lower scores (and grades) than whites and Asians?

Med schools do an excellent job of selecting students who will do well in medical school and beyond. The graduation rate is extremely high, the drop out rate is extremely low

I would say they know how to select students who will very likely do well. Overall, graduation rate is high, but I would not say extremely high - overall, 6% don't graduate within five years.

and is more related to financial and life stress than any academic pressure.

That is based on self-reporting. How about we look at data instead? As I said, overall 6% fail to graduate in five years. But that is very dependent on MCAT and grades. An MCAT of 498-501 it climbs to 12%, twice the average, and three times the rate for ≥510 MCATs.
We see similar relationship to GPAs and also to both regarding failure to pass Step 1.
And that is also where race comes in. We do not see 5 year graduation rates or Step 1 pass rates by race, but way upthread somebody posted data that 1st year dropout rate was 2.5x for blacks. That is consistent with the data I gave above and with the fact that blacks are admitted with lower academic performance.

You are the one who seems married to the idea that only the students with the X highest scores should be admitted, X being the number of seats in an incoming class.

I am not. I understand that many factors matter, and that GPA and MCAT will thus have a relatively wide distribution.
But I maintain that this distribution should be comparable among groups. An Asian with a 3.4 and 502 should not be any less likely to get into med school than a 3.4 and 502 black student.
You are strawmaning by pretending that this objection means that I think only students with highest scores should be admitted.

MCAT and GPA provide a lot of good information but they do not select for students who have other requisite characteristics aside from intellectual capacity to make good physicians.

True, but race is not such an "other requisite characteristic".

And physicians who want to do the job including for underserved communities.

I do not think it's right to give somebody a boost because of their race and then hope that being black means they want to be a hospitalist at Grady rather than an orthopedic surgeon in Alpharetta.
Better approach would be to offer tuition reimbursements for x years service as primary care in partner clinics and hospitals that serve an underserved population. But that deal should be open to everyone, regardless of race or Spanish-speaking abuelitos.

 

[Derec]

To be fair, nothing you’ve said substantiates any of your claims.

BS.

The reliance on national averages masks any relevant variation by region or mission or subgroup or any other factors that might help explain differences.

You have not offered a way how these things would explain away the difference in MCAT and GPA distributions. It's not like lower MCAT Asians would apply to the same schools as higher scoring ones.

Add to that the well-known history of academic institutions, including medical schools, desiring to give racial preferences, and I do not see how this denialism is in any way intellectually credible.

 

[Derec]

Haven't we demonstrated there is nothing wrong with the system as is?

You have not. Data show significant differences in academic performance for admitted students based on race and ethnicity. We also know that academic performance is linked with success in medical school - for example passing Step 1 and graduating within 5 years.

You, and others, appear desperate to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

We disagree, obviously.

 

[Derec]

Is there any doubt in your mind that Trump—and every other single major party POTUS/candidate chose his/her VP running mate from the pool of candidates limited to white males with the exception of Geraldine Ferrara and Sarah Palin?

This is fallacious reasoning on two levels.
First, you are assuming that every time a woman wasn't selected only men were considered. It is very much possible that e.g. Nixon or McGovern considered a woman or two for running mate more than a decade before Ferraro got the nod.
Second, you are concluding that if women were excluded in the past, it is ok to exclude men in the present. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Third, you misspelled Geraldine Ferraro's name.

It was simply understood that the only candidate deemed suitable was white and male.

At some points in our history that was certainly true. And it is good to open consideration to women and non-whites. It is not good to limit consideration to black women only. Are you really constitutionally incapable of grasping the difference between these two things?

Why wasn’t that a problem?

Who said it wasn't? But you don't fix past discrimination by discriminating today.

 

[Politesse]

For one, this thread is about so-called "affirmative action" which is very much a racial policy/ideology.

I see that you are trying to frame it that way, but you are not correct. "Affirmative action", a catchphrase from thirty years ago, is not the basis of the avalanche of evidence against the efficacy of standardized exams in predicting graduate student success, nor does it play a direct role in admissions or hiring decisions at the institutions you are targeting.

 

[Politesse]

Are you really going to deny that academic institutions want to give preferences to members of certain groups in order to increase their representation? That level of reality denial would be truly Trumpian.

If you disagree, consider presenting some actual evidence, in place of rhetoric and dumbass Marvel memes.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

There's a study that has a table. I have only skimmed some sparse text around the table. Something like there was a survey of doctors working for the Indian Health Services, not everyone responded. The goal of the survey was not demographics, I don't think, but questions were asked and this racial/ethnic breakdown is in the table for respondents:

Race/ethnicity*
White 261 (78)
American Indian/ Alaska Native 48 (14)
Hispanic 32 (9)
Asian 26 (8)
Black 13 (4)
Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander 1 (1)
Other 1 (1)

I don't think it is entirely unreasonable to extrapolate this, but again I have not read the study in full. What I immediately observe is there are only 8% Asian doctors but Asian doctors in the general population are much larger than that.

This is true, but it's easy to read more into it than is warranted. Geography plays a big role -- the states where people served by the IHS are concentrated, like Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, have low Asian American populations. There are ten times as many white doctors as Asian doctors working on reservations but that doesn't mean Asians are less willing than whites; it just means those states are chock full of white people. Doctors like anyone else mostly want to work close to home.

Also, there are 14% NA/AN doctors but NA/AN doctors in the general population of doctors are like less than 1%.

Very true, and it's important; but again, it's easy to read too much into it. Race is a lousy proxy for willingness. Over 90% of NA doctors don't work on reservations; they get jobs in cities just like everybody else.

It doesn't quite seem that NA doctors get jobs in the same geographic distribution as everyone else.

This blurb comes from the second study I linked, which looks at practice patterns nationally:

There are also significant difference in geographic distribution across primary care specialties with family physicians and general practitioners overall having higher proportion practicing in HPSA, MUA/P, and rural areas in the study cohort (see Figures 2 through 4). Among primary care physicians as a whole, substantial racial/ethnic differences exist in how they distribute geographically (p < .0001). Black, Native American, and Hispanic groups have higher proportions practicing in HPSA, MUA/P, and rural areas compared with White primary care physicians and the Asian group, who have smaller proportions practicing in these areas. Within each primary care specialty, significant differences by race and ethnicity (p < .0001) also exist across the geographies. Black, Native Americans, and Hispanic groups have higher proportions practicing in HPSA and MUA/P than their White peers in all three primary care specialties. Native American primary care physicians have the highest proportion practicing in rural areas, whereas White primary care physicians have higher proportions practicing in rural areas compared with Black or Hispanic primary care physicians. In particular, the Native American primary care physicians have high proportions practicing in all three underserved areas. The Asian primary care physicians also have a substantial number practicing in these areas, but their proportions practicing in these areas are much smaller compared with any other racial/ethnic group.

I understand the argument that observed geographic distribution doesn't strictly prove willingness to be distributed that way. Adults have some freedom to move around for residencies and hospital placements, but life is complex--people want to stay close to family, spouses have jobs, etc. However, when we see such pronounced, statistically significant differences in where different demographic groups ultimately practice, it strains credibility to say it has nothing to do with willingness or cultural priorities. If Native American primary care physicians have the highest proportion practicing in rural areas across all specialties, there is clearly some drive to serve those specific communities.

Your point about geography is really interesting, though, and it adds another variable to the admissions math. Geography has a long-lasting, multi-generational impact on racial distribution. Examples: Alaska has a high AN population but very few Asians. Oklahoma has a high NA population but few Asians. California is packed with Asian applicants, while West Virginia is overwhelmingly White.

Because many state and regional medical schools give heavy admissions preference to in-state residents, this creates massive, structural bottlenecks. It makes me wonder how this plays out in the application data. Very few Asians attend the medical schools in Puerto Rico, which have lower MCAT medians, or state schools in places like Oklahoma or West Virginia. Do they willingly refuse to apply because they want to stay close to home (e.g., California/New York)? Is it a prestige consideration? Do out-of-state regional schools aggressively filter out applicants from the coasts, knowing they likely won't stay and practice there? Something else?

Regardless of the why, the end result is a highly segmented applicant pool. If Asian applicants are overwhelmingly clustered in certain states, and predominantly applying to the same highly competitive coastal schools and elite private institutions, the "average" acceptance thresholds for that cohort are going to be driven sky-high by sheer regional bottlenecking.

Is this a "Stanley Zhong" effect, where applicants would rather take a prestigious tech job or pursue a prestigious non-MD educational path than attend a lower-tier, out-of-state medical school? Or is it simply a mathematical reality of massive subpopulations competing for a geographically limited set of seats? I suspect the "average" admissions data we are looking at is actually masking these intense, localized geographic dynamics.

 

[laughing dog]

To be fair, nothing you’ve said substantiates any of your claims.

BS.

The reliance on national averages masks any relevant variation by region or mission or subgroup or any other factors that might help explain differences.

You have not offered a way how these things would explain away the difference in MCAT and GPA distributions.

BS. More than one poster has.

History has shown that nothing can get you to dismount one of your irrational hobby horses.

 

[Toni]

I’m not displeased with the current system except that higher education is far too expensive and too many are extremely overburdened by education debt, and too many are discouraged from pursuing advanced and professional degrees.

While I understand that higher education has become very expensive, I do not see that discouraging too many people. Number of applicants is ~2x the number of US MD and DO seats and more people are applying. If even more people applied, it would be overall even more difficult to get into med school.

I don’t have any issue with med schools using the MCAT or with USMLE.

But you still want blacks and Hispanics to be accepted with lower scores (and grades) than whites and Asians?

Med schools do an excellent job of selecting students who will do well in medical school and beyond. The graduation rate is extremely high, the drop out rate is extremely low

I would say they know how to select students who will very likely do well. Overall, graduation rate is high, but I would not say extremely high - overall, 6% don't graduate within five years.

and is more related to financial and life stress than any academic pressure.

That is based on self-reporting. How about we look at data instead? As I said, overall 6% fail to graduate in five years. But that is very dependent on MCAT and grades. An MCAT of 498-501 it climbs to 12%, twice the average, and three times the rate for ≥510 MCATs.
We see similar relationship to GPAs and also to both regarding failure to pass Step 1.
And that is also where race comes in. We do not see 5 year graduation rates or Step 1 pass rates by race, but way upthread somebody posted data that 1st year dropout rate was 2.5x for blacks. That is consistent with the data I gave above and with the fact that blacks are admitted with lower academic performance.

You are the one who seems married to the idea that only the students with the X highest scores should be admitted, X being the number of seats in an incoming class.

I am not. I understand that many factors matter, and that GPA and MCAT will thus have a relatively wide distribution.
But I maintain that this distribution should be comparable among groups. An Asian with a 3.4 and 502 should not be any less likely to get into med school than a 3.4 and 502 black student.
You are strawmaning by pretending that this objection means that I think only students with highest scores should be admitted.

MCAT and GPA provide a lot of good information but they do not select for students who have other requisite characteristics aside from intellectual capacity to make good physicians.

True, but race is not such an "other requisite characteristic".

And physicians who want to do the job including for underserved communities.

I do not think it's right to give somebody a boost because of their race and then hope that being black means they want to be a hospitalist at Grady rather than an orthopedic surgeon in Alpharetta.
Better approach would be to offer tuition reimbursements for x years service as primary care in partner clinics and hospitals that serve an underserved population. But that deal should be open to everyone, regardless of race or Spanish-speaking abuelitos.

Higher education is post secondary school: i.e. university, community college and even trade schools are getting expensive.

Again, nothing in the stats is granular enough to state with any real accuracy what you claim that it does. We know that different hopefuls apply to different schools for different reasons. For many and probably most, location--usually close to home--is one of the most important factors. Students have more access to support from family and friends if they are not so far that they can only see their family once a year or so. It's also familiar which can be helpful for someone who is about to embark on an adventure in a whole new world, so to speak. Of course, others thrive on novelty and some want to study at a particular school because of its reputation in (x) branch of medical practice. Some embark on a joint MD PhD program, which are more rare.

Don has gone into some detail about what goes into decision making re: applicants at universities and at med schools upthread. I don't care to repeat his excellent points but you really ought to consider them, unless you feel better wallowing in conspiracy theories about how beleaguered and put upon white and Asian men are.

 

[Toni]

Is there any doubt in your mind that Trump—and every other single major party POTUS/candidate chose his/her VP running mate from the pool of candidates limited to white males with the exception of Geraldine Ferrara and Sarah Palin?

This is fallacious reasoning on two levels.
First, you are assuming that every time a woman wasn't selected only men were considered. It is very much possible that e.g. Nixon or McGovern considered a woman or two for running mate more than a decade before Ferraro got the nod.
Second, you are concluding that if women were excluded in the past, it is ok to exclude men in the present. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Third, you misspelled Geraldine Ferraro's name.

It was simply understood that the only candidate deemed suitable was white and male.

At some points in our history that was certainly true. And it is good to open consideration to women and non-whites. It is not good to limit consideration to black women only. Are you really constitutionally incapable of grasping the difference between these two things?

Why wasn’t that a problem?

Who said it wasn't? But you don't fix past discrimination by discriminating today.

You don't eliminate current discrimination by pretending that it is against white and Asian men, either.

You seem perfectly fine with allowing the status quo from 50 years ago to continue, with formal laws against actually barring black people and women from certain roles. It's like deciding that it's a good time to start being fair to everyone after you're as rich as say, Elon Musk.

How's that working out for the world?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

But if you can't see past some knee-jerk "OMG THAT MUST BE RACIST!!!!" reaction that's on you.

First, I am going to take you out of context just a little bit. Second, I am not trying to contradict anything you are stating. I merely find the general comment of "knee-jerk 'OMG THAT MUST BE RACIST!!!!' reaction" to be the type of criticism I have seen before. Perhaps it was from Loren, Derec, or thebeave. In that kind of commentary, there is an alleged left that views correlations or mean differences or what have you and jumps to a conclusion of "Aha, that must be racist!" So I merely found some commonality there with the type of language and thought I could use that to launch a thought experiment really directed to anyone who wants to participate in it.

After all, that is sort of what is being done here. Looking at differences in means and deciding the prevalent cause for the observation is (reverse) racism.

In any case, recall from the other thread a post by Jimmy Higgins where he listed MCAT, GPA, acceptance rates from a blog:

Group	MCAT	GPA	Acceptance Rate
Asian	514.3	3.85	44.5%
White	512.3	3.82	47.2%
Middle Eastern/North African	511.7	3.84	38.4%
Black/African American	507.2	3.65	35.9%
Hispanic/Latino	506.8	3.71	38.9%
American Indian/Alaska Native	505.2	3.64	40.7%

Thought Experiment

Take the above but ignore the bottom rows:


We observe small differences between the White and Middle Eastern/North African MCAT and GPAs, but an unexpectedly large difference in acceptance rate. Do we comment "Islamophobia is for realz!", "Whites clearly are rigging the system," or do we try to delve into how this is happening? Likewise, for a comparison between Whites and Asians: Whites have a higher acceptance rate but slightly less GPA and less MCAT. Do we say this is due to racial preferences of propping up White people?

Do we try to blame this on the unseen statistics of the other racial groups and alleged preferences there? Well, in that case, each of the remaining top 3 groups would still be effected equally proportionally and not have such differences, first. Secondly, we're starting to see the idea here: there could be something unseen in the chart that affects the numbers and means by themselves (or means and stdevs) do not necessarily imply racism...

Okay, so how about this? Whatever the variables are that play into the differences we observe when we look at the whole table, those same variables also play some roles in the top three acceptance rate differences, too? Why not be consistent?

Here's a possible contributing factor and it might not be the most significant (I don't think it is): foreigners. Foreign citizens cannot apply to most medical schools and the few to which they can apply are difficult to get into. If we suppose that there are relatively quite a few Asian and Middle Eastern foreigners who took the MCAT and are trying to get into medical school, they may be getting rejected at a higher rate and skewing the numbers. To add--there are more medical schools that accept Canadians for some reason than foreigners in general, but Canadians are going to tend to be White. So this can create some kind of skews or biases in the data. I don't think the total count of foreigners is huge, but it might impact numbers. True stories: when I took a break from college I worked at a restaurant and one of my co-workers was an Egyptian doctor working as a dishwasher trying to study for MCATs. He had to achieve a certain threshold to apply where he wanted to go to medical school (I think, if I recall correctly). Also, later on in my actual career, I had a colleague from China who had a MD Phd but he was not trying to take MCATs. In both cases, my recollection is that they did not have to do the same number of years of study to get their medical degrees in their home countries. It doesn't convert over when they become residents. Anyway, this could create skews not only in acceptance rates but also in MCAT scores themselves.

I think the other variables are still on the table from previous discussion. Not an exhaustive list: yes, actual discrimination or adjusting criteria directly in admissions based on race; "willingness" to work in underserved areas OR mission fitness differences across demographics, geographic "bottlenecks"; how much each demographic applies to different tiers or prestige consideration; Tufts Syndrome; etc.

What do you or anyone else think are the root cause(s) for the differences in acceptance rates for the top three rows and what is the evidence for that thinking?

 

[Bomb#20]

What do you or anyone else think are the root cause(s) for the differences in acceptance rates for the top three rows and what is the evidence for that thinking?

The whole thing is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The MCAT/GPA numbers shown are functions of the admitted students; the acceptance rates are functions of the applying students. You need MCAT/GPA numbers for the applicant pools to infer anything meaningful.

 

[Derec]

I see that you are trying to frame it that way, but you are not correct. "Affirmative action", a catchphrase from thirty years ago,

More like 60 years ago, but that does not mean that this ideology is not strongly embraced by the academia and left-wing politicians. OF course, there are other words that the supporters came up over the years, such as "race-conscious admissions". But it's essentially the same thing.

is not the basis of the avalanche of evidence against the efficacy of standardized exams in predicting graduate student success,

There is a lot of opposition to standardized tests from certain circles, but that is not the same as evidence of lack of efficacy. Much less an "avalanche" thereof. I have shown based on AAMC data that higher scores are associated with higher Step 1 pass rates and graduation rates.
Leftist ideologues such as yourself hate standardized tests because its an objective measure where all students are measured by the same yardstick. That means that it cannot be manipulated to get the outcome you want, unlike say "personality scores".

nor does it play a direct role in admissions or hiring decisions at the institutions you are targeting.

Of course it does. The data show it, and the schools admit that they want a more "diverse" student body, by which they mean one with fewer whites and Asians.

 

[Politesse]

That means that it cannot be manipulated to get the outcome you want, unlike say "personality scores".

That's ridiculous. The whole point of a standardized exam is to do exactly that, set some arbitrarily defined corpus of knowledge as "standard" and rate all takers relative to their familiarity with it. It's always "manipulated". There is no other way for it to be. Exams don't pop magically into existence, they are assembled by a committee based on their intersubjective experience and values.

 

[Toni]

That means that it cannot be manipulated to get the outcome you want, unlike say "personality scores".

That's ridiculous. The whole point of a standardized exam is to do exactly that, set some arbitrarily defined corpus of knowledge as "standard" and rate all takers relative to their familiarity with it. It's always "manipulated". There is no other way for it to be. Exams don't pop magically into existence, they are assembled by a committee based on their intersubjective experience and values.

There used to exist examples of SAT exam questions that were biased towards black students with references to black culture peppered throughout. Not ever actually used but to demonstrate how ‘standardized tests’ were inherently biased towards the culture of this writing the test questions. Predictably white people lost their damn minds because there were questions that flummoxed them.

 

[laughing dog]

What do you or anyone else think are the root cause(s) for the differences in acceptance rates for the top three rows and what is the evidence for that thinking?

The whole thing is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The MCAT/GPA numbers shown are functions of the admitted students; the acceptance rates are functions of the applying students. You need MCAT/GPA numbers for the applicant pools to infer anything meaningful.

Every analysis in this thread is a "fruit salad" mix in some sense. Hasn't stopped anyone.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

What do you or anyone else think are the root cause(s) for the differences in acceptance rates for the top three rows and what is the evidence for that thinking?

The whole thing is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The MCAT/GPA numbers shown are functions of the admitted students; the acceptance rates are functions of the applying students. You need MCAT/GPA numbers for the applicant pools to infer anything meaningful.

Sorry. I did not mean to give an impression that the thought exercise only had to rely on the data given. However, some people have drawn conclusions only from means of mcats and gpas without delving into the data and researching other data out there.

 

[Derec]

If you disagree, consider presenting some actual evidence, in place of rhetoric and dumbass Marvel memes.

I did present a lot of evidence. Unlike you and your Ilk, who only have just-so stories.

As to the meme, I reject that. J.K. Simmons is a national treasure, and you fully deserved the ridicule of the gif.

 

[Politesse]

I meant evidence for your claim.

 

[Derec]

That sounds like you deny the effects of generational racism exists. It's they only way for your point to work.

Whatever these effects are, and I think they are significantly exaggerated by the left, I do not think a solution is to keep holding certain people to a lesser standard based on their race. I do not think it is really helping blacks in the long run either. Racial preferences have existed in one form or another for 60 years or so, and they have not fixed anything.