It turns out that affirmative action might have some downsides!
According to a bombshell report from The Washington Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium, the University of California, Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine is a case in point.
This shows the pass rate (green) compared to failure rate (red) of students in various cohorts like Family Medicine, Neurology, and Pediatrics.
Compare this data from the 2022-2024 academic years to a chart showing 2020-2023 (pay attention to how the failure rate skyrockets in each cohort as you read from left to right, moving from year to year).
I'll zoom in on Family Medicine as an example:
Now to Family Medicine in 2022-2024, where the fail rate jumped near or over 50% in several of the block groups:
It used to be difficult to get into UCLA for medical school (we're talking 173 students accepted out of 14,000 applications). At this rate of 1.3%, you'd have a better chance of escaping a White House event without being sniffed than getting into UCLA medical school.
But in November 2021, the admissions committee faced a dilemma. One applicant, who was black, had grades and test scores far below the UCLA average. While some members of the committee didn't think this candidate was a good fit, Jennifer Lucero, the dean of admissions, went into full rage mode.
"Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?" she reportedly thundered. Her point? Scores shouldn't matter because "we need people like this in the medical school."
Except … by California law since 1996, UCLA can't consider race in admissions.
This meltdown didn't go down well. One admissions officer fired off an email saying, "We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants," adding, "If this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female...[whether] would we have had that much discussion."
Since Lucero took the helm in June 2020, complaints have piled up like vegan food deliveries at pro-Hamas encampments on a college campus. Faculty say the focus has shifted from merit to diversity to such an extent that students, according to one insider, "don't know anything."
They fail basic exams, they can't identify major arteries, and they blame the professors for putting them on the spot. Over 50 percent of some cohorts are failing standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics, while the school's ranking in medicine nosedived from 6th to 18th nationally.
(At this point, if your doctor is from UCLA, it might be better just to Google your symptoms and accept your fate...)
From the Washington Free Beacon report:
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, according to internal data obtained by the Free Beacon.
That uptick coincided with a steep drop in the number of Asian matriculants and tracks the subjective impressions of faculty who say that students have never been more poorly prepared.
These allegations are so severe that according to legal scholar David Bernstein, if even half of them are true, "UCLA Medical School should cease to exist."
According to this report, it seems like diversity is all that matters at UCLA's med school. One former admissions staffer put it bluntly: "We want racial diversity so badly, we're willing to cut corners to get it."
Meanwhile, dissenters are accused of being "privileged," and when a Native American applicant was reportedly rejected, she made the committee sit through a two-hour lecture on Native history … delivered by her sister.
Because you can't spell racial diversity without nepotism!
Or maybe you can … who knows? I'm just the diversity hire.
Follow Ian on Substack or X (@ighaworth).
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
