The University of Massachusetts will set aside 12 slots at its medical school for members of “underrepresented” groups, which include blacks, “Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers.” (Source)
Wow. I guess the school could cram a couple students from each group into those lower-standard slots.
For people who don’t believe preferences and set asides equal lower standards and think I sound like a broken record, consider this: without even looking at grades, scores, and statistics, why do you think schools set aside slots for members of certain races if these students are being admitted under the same standard as everyone else? Students admitted to those 12 slots are not being assessed in the general pool of applicants. The med school has minimum criteria, of course, but the race and ethnicity of these students are given weight that others students don’t get. With the set-aside slots, no matter how small or large, students are being admitted or denied admission based on race.
According to the article, low-income and first-generation college students of any ethnic background could apply under the “Medical Scholars Program.” That makes it sound as if any poor or first-generation college students can apply, if we go by plain language. But everyone on the face of the planet has an “ethnic background.” Do they have in mind ethnic Germans and ethnic Lithuanians?
The Center for Equal Opportunity‘s Roger Clegg blogs at The Corner:
“I won’t make the usual and obvious points about why discrimination on the basis of skin color and national origin is unfair, divisive, and stupid. All that aside, this seems to me to be almost certainly illegal. To be sure, this isn’t exactly like the race/ethnicity set-aside program that was struck down in Bakke, since here the slots are also (in theory at least) going to be open to applications from members of disfavored racial and ethnic groups, so long as they are low-income or the first in their families to attend college. But this is still a very mechanical use of race, like the point system struck down in Gratz v. Bollinger. And the justification given for the racially discriminatory program by UMass president Jack Wilson is the need for ‘role models’ — which has also been rejected by the Supreme Court (in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in 1986).”
A commenter writes:
“In one fell swoop, they have DESTROYED the value of the years of hard work and academic merit of any minority candidate who might graduate through the color-blind open competition admissions process (this includes all minorities from any other state or country (or even worse, from this state) who are not among the ‘special’ 12 minorities who are given this unique ‘reverse discrimination’ privilege). Not only have they stripped all value from the degrees of the truly accomplished minority candidates, but the existence of this affirmative-action program will spread like wildfire by word of mouth, and knowledgeable patients will intentionally avoid any contact with ALL minority graduates of UMass Medical School for fear of being treated by one of these affirmative-action ‘doctors’ who may not know what they are doing. The stigma of this program will drive all of these fully-qualified minority graduates out-of-state after they become doctors, where they will hope that few people will know of the existence of this truly disastrous program.”
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