The AAMC Pushes Faulty Arguments in Ill-Founded Defense of DEI

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) published an article Wednesday attempting to debunk several so-called “myths” about diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at medical schools. 

But instead, the AAMC advanced claims that lacked evidence and resorted to ideological platitudes to defend its agenda.

Here’s what they said, and why they’re wrong:

The AAMC claims it’s a “myth” that “diversity efforts are resulting in unqualified students being accepted to medical school.”

Programs that prioritize race over merit are, by definition, prioritizing less qualified applicants over their more qualified peers. If a black or Hispanic student is chosen over a white or Asian student with better test scores, grades, and relevant experience, then less qualified students are being accepted into medical schools.

This practice is unquestionably occurring; we need only look at 2013-2016 admissions data analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute to see that black and Hispanic students were accepted at far higher rates than their white and Asian counterparts with similar grades and Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores.

To support its argument, the AAMC cites data showing MCAT scores and graduation rates have remained steady over the past five years.

But this is faulty reasoning; the average test scores of medical students in aggregate can remain steady while racial discrimination is still being practiced and less qualified applicants are being admitted to medical schools. Moreover, race-conscious admissions have been in place at numerous medical schools for far longer than five years, so the five-year range chosen by the AAMC is misleading.

Medical schools are also, by their own admission, deprioritizing test scores and grades in their admissions process. This is explicitly lowering standards to increase diversity.

For instance, numerous medical schools are outright ditching the MCAT, with the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine waiving MCAT requirements specifically for certain applicants from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The MCAT itself also changed in 2015, spending more time on the “crucial role that sociocultural and behavioral determinants play in our health” and less on biology and physics.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the second-largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, deprioritized test scores for incoming medical residents in favor of “holistic reviews” that weighed candidates’ race. The school also required admissions personnel to undergo unconscious bias training.

At the University of California Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine, admissions committee members bemoaned the school’s extraordinarily low admissions standards for minority students, stating that the school was becoming a “failed” institution, according to the Washington Free Beacon. In certain cohorts, “more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics,” the Free Beacon reported. These tests typically have a 5 percent failure rate.

The bar for students deemed “underrepresented” is “as low as you could possibly imagine,” an admissions committee member told the Free Beacon. “It completely disregards grades and achievements.”

For yet another example, a 2023 study examining the performance of emergency medicine residents found that the Underrepresented in Medicine (URM) trainees, or trainees who were not white and/or Asian, were deemed to have demonstrated less medical knowledge and less effective patient care.

Similarly, a 2021 study published in Academic Medicine, the AAMC’s own journal, found that URM medical students routinely “experience delayed graduation and course failure” at a higher rate than their Asian and white peers. Of course, the study blames structural racism for this achievement gap.

Moreover, medical schools seem more concerned with DEI efforts than they do with recruiting the best and brightest. A Do No Harm review of the over 100 AAMC-accredited medical schools’ mission statements found the words “diverse” and “diversity” appeared 177 times, while “merit” appeared only once.

These facts are obviously not reflected in AAMC’s defense of DEI, as they undercut the organization’s narrative.

The AAMC claims it’s a “myth” that “diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in medical schools are about pushing a political agenda and are a detriment to the practice of medicine.”

The AAMC does not make an effort to refute the first claim that DEI in medical schools is a part of a political agenda. Presumably, that is because the subject is not really up for debate.

In fact, the AAMC itself defines “anti-racism,” a core tenet of DEI, as “the work of actively opposing racism by advocating for changes in political, economic, and social life.” Moreover, as of 2022, over 75% of medical schools actively lobby at the local, state, and federal level for policies related to DEI.

Instead, the AAMC cites data showing racial disparities in health outcomes as justification for the necessity of DEI programs and a more diverse pool of healthcare professionals.

However, the AAMC does not provide any evidence indicating that DEI initiatives are, or would be, effective at addressing these health disparities.

Previously, the AAMC has trotted out the line that “racism” and not race itself drives these health disparities and that race is a “social construct” that has no place in clinical algorithms.

This idea has gained popularity in recent years, but is utterly unscientific; as an example, a recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine argued that higher rates of preeclampsia in black women are due to racism, and not biological factors.

However, as Do No Harm’s Ian Kingsbury has shown, the far more likely culprits for these disparities are genetics and behavior, with roughly 55 percent of preeclampsia risk estimated to be genetic.

Moreover, the implication that minority patients can be better treated by minority physicians is similarly unsupported.

As Do No Harm has shown, the majority of the research on the effectiveness of racial concordance, or the treating of patients by a physician of the same race, demonstrates no positive effect on health outcomes.

The AAMC claims it’s a “myth” that “DEI is just code for discriminating in favor of Black and Hispanic/Latino people.”

In practice, DEI initiatives involve overt racism. Do No Harm has cataloged scores of racially discriminatory medical school programs, fellowships, and other initiatives that exclude white and/or Asian applicants to advance the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

To counter this obviously true “myth,” the AAMC notes the fact that AAMC enrollment data shows black and Hispanic students are still “underrepresented” at medical schools. By this, the AAMC means that the proportion of black and Hispanic medical students is not equivalent to their share of the U.S. population.

This is a non-sequitur; the current racial composition of medical schools has no bearing on whether or not discrimination in favor of black and Hispanic students is ongoing and widespread.

A better gauge is whether black and Hispanic students are being favored by medical school policies. Beyond the numerous public examples of racially discriminatory behavior by medical schools, we can simply look at which racial groups are favored in medical school admissions.

And according to the aforementioned 2013-2016 admissions data analyzed by the American Enterprise Institute, black and Hispanic students had a far easier time getting into medical school with the same test scores and grades as their white and Asian peers.

This is quite simply racial discrimination.

The AAMC claims it’s a “myth” that “funding of DEI programs would be better spent on scientific advancement or other aspects of medical education.”

Funding for DEI programs would be better directed toward almost anything else.

DEI isn’t simply a distraction from medical schools’ primary mission to educate their students about medicine, it is immoral and dangerous.

Take, for example, the American Heart Association’s decision to remove race from its cardiovascular disease risk calculator in the name of making the tool more “equitable.” A new paper warned the AHA’s changes could make millions of people ineligible for much-needed medication.

Or take a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which attempted to blame systemic racism for excess mortality among the black population, without considering other genetic and societal factors.

The logical conclusion of these ideas is to spend money chasing the phantom of “systemic racism” while failing to address and understand the real culprits for these health outcomes. This naturally leads to worse health outcomes for the exact racial groups the DEI advocates are claiming to support.

Rather than grapple with this, the AAMC instead quotes a DEI advocate who claims the practice is grounded on “science.”

That “science” is mysteriously absent from the AAMC’s article.

This latest AAMC publication is yet another example of the organization’s unwavering commitment to DEI over medical ethics and intellectual rigor. Do No Harm has previously exposed the AAMC for spreading misinformation to advance its DEI agenda.

It seems old habits die hard.