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Data on MCATs agree with your anecdote - Asians seem to need to meet a higher bar to be accepted into med school.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.o...

It's difficult to conclude that from those statistics alone, as we don't know the distribution of MCAT and GPA scores within the self-identified Asian applicants - a higher mean may be because it is positively skewed. In that regard, it would be interesting to see the median values too. Or the stats for the rejected cohort.

From a comment on Reddit so research required but it could be true that it comes down to money:

"As an applicant to medical school. On the day of my interview at my state school, a director basically told everybody that the school favored Hispanics/Latinos because the school is given state/federal? money if they churn out a lot of Hispanic/Latino doctors. My stomach dropped when I heard that. As other have pointed out, medical schools clearly hold Asians to a higher standard than any other race."

If that anecdote is true, it means the medical school would have a bias against anyone who doesn't identify as Hispanic/Latino, and not necessarily a specific bias against Asians.

>wow this person has it all - smart, charismatic, hard working, intellectual curiosity, top notch GPA, tons of extracurriculars - this is a no brainer, he'd be a great doctor"

All those don't make a great doctor. I have couple of friends who are currently in med school and are there because they wanted social prestige of being a doctor and not particularly because they have some sort of passion for medicine.

All of them did "volunteering" in school just so they can brag about it in their med school applications, not because they wanted to better the community they live in.

Being a type A prestige seeker doesn't make someone a good doctor.

True, but I have no reason to believe that my Asian and non-Asian friends differed in that regard.

The one I'd most label a "prestige seeker" wasn't Asian and got accepted into a great school right after undergrad, but that's an anecdote within an anecdote. Besides that, I wouldn't come close to calling any of them prestige seekers.

> Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level.

But if you accept it here, why not accept it everywhere?

Either race-based discrimination is bad and should never be done or acceptable in some cases. If it's bad, Harvard (and others) should stop immediately. End of story.

If it's acceptable in "some cases" the next question is: Who determines those cases? And then: Are there a set of fixed criteria or is it a case by case basis? If it's case by case, who empowers and chooses the group making the decisions? What oversight and rules are on this group?

The "some cases" scenario is ripe for malfeasance and influence peddling.. which is just another "good old boys club."

Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school.

The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario. So the root cause of that problem isn't racial discrimination, it's just that racial discrimintation in that context might have a much bigger impact due to some other unrelated factors.

Beyond the med school issue, racial discrimination in college admissions is pretty far down the list of issues in society that I'm worried about, because it just doesn't have that big of an impact.

> Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school.

> The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario.

Since the bottleneck is residency programs, not the number of people who receive MDs, all this would do is increase the number of people who have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt without being able to legally practice medicine.

There are more people who graduate medical school than there there are residency slots available, and since residency slots are government-funded (through Medicare). Establishing new medical schools won't do anything.

I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing?

Also, what do you mean residency programs are the bottleneck? Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Then we should increase residency programs. Whatever. I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.

> I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing?

I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine.

> Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine?

Yes, because medical school isn't where you learn to practice medicine; residency is.

> Then we should increase residency programs.

There are so many political barriers to allocating the kind of funding necessary for this that it's not a realistic expectation anytime for the foreseeable future.

> I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.

Sort of - but the medical field is rather complicated to a degree that would be tough to summarize in an HN comment. In short, yes, this general principle is true, but in the case of medicine, there are enough confounding factors that it's not as simple as "more residency programs → more and better care". If you could hold everything else constant, yes, that may be the case, but in practice, this wouldn't happen in isolation, and there would be a lot of other effects.

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-... says this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo. I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years.

But the whole system seems weird to me as an outsider.

> this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo.

Well, for starters, some of that is self-selecting, in that the only people who feel they are competitive candidates for a residency even apply. Overall, there are about 15,000 more applicants than first-year residency positions as of last year - 40,394 total.

Also, that 412 number is looking at the people who didn't match, which isn't actually the same as saying how many were "unaccepted". Residencies don't work like undergraduate admissions. The residency matching is a complicated two-way process that separates by field, so the 412 aggregate number isn't actually answering the same question. This is implied by the discussion of primary care residencies halfway down the article you link, but if you're not already familiar with the process, you wouldn't notice it.

Finally, that is only looking at students in the United States who did not match. Many residents in the US attended medical school outside the US. In fact, it's very common for US students who don't get into medical school in the US to go to medical schools in the Caribbean instead, and then come back to the US to do their residency so they can practice in their home country.

> I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years.

The number of residency programs is increasing, so population growth isn't the concern. The original topic of discussion was increasing the availability of doctors - in other words, increasing the number of residency programs by an order of magnitude, rather than incrementally, as has occurred almost every year since 1952.

Pick your battles.

True... but what if you are going to have to spend your whole life fighting against silent discrimination?

Reddit CEO Ellen Pao says she is hiring for diversity. Google and IBM are putting hundreds of millions into diversity programmes for hiring and training. Twitter is publishing employee diversity reports.

So if you're a coding genius but you're white or Asian, straight, male, not disabled, guess what?

You're not going to be hired by tech start-ups and companies who are obsessed about showing how "diverse" they are rather than hiring the best candidate for the job.

I don't think any tech firms that are concerned with diversity are not hiring "coding geniuses" that happen to be White or Asian.

Diversity programs mainly attempt to increasing the number of members of currently-underrepresented groups in the entrance of the hiring funnel and reducing biases in the hiring process that select for currently-overrepresented groups over merit.

People should only be hired on merit.

It should not be the job of human resources to resolve social issues.

Maybe it's just that the accepted applicants were of the same quality or better, in terms of their predicted suitability to practice medicine. The fact is that not everyone can get into such highly competitive programmes, and unfortunately some have to lose out.

That wouldn't explain my observations, where excellent non-Asian applicants were shoe-ins on their first try and Asian applicants of the same quality had to try multiple times, some of them never making it in at all. If it was just a numbers issue and not everyone could make it in, you wouldn't expect such a clear racial difference.

Of course my anecdotes could just be flukes or I could be misinterpreting the quality of various candidates. But given what we know about undergrad admissions, it's not a stretch to imagine the same thing in med school. It's just that med school acceptance is much more impactful than undergrad.

> Of course my anecdotes could just be flukes or I could be misinterpreting the quality of various candidates.

The beauty of commenting on HN is that you don't need to provide data or citations, you can just write down anecdotes (made up or not), and you'll be upvoted by those who like what you say. And you can feel good about it, because the community thinks it has an intellectual side, engaging in deep conversations about a variety of topics.

Yeah, real intellectuals only communicate by exchanging peer-reviewed publications. Besides that, they're basically mimes.

> The beauty of commenting on HN is that you don't need to provide data or citations, you can just write down anecdotes

You didn't finish your thought. The beauty of HN isn't just that. Because immediately after doing that, someone jumps out and points out that you didn't write a research paper backing up your comment on the internet. Thanks for keeping the HN culture alive and strong.

As an aside, if you're genuinely curious about this subject, there has been a lot written about it, a lot of research done into it, and a clear bias has been show against certain minorities which tend to outperform other populations (asians, jews, etc.). If I actually cared about convincing you, I would cite a few, but I don't actually care what you think and this is the internet ... so please use Google.

I think that unless you're privy to all the information that the admissions staff are using to judge acceptance, including the quality of the competition and a myriad of other factors that you or I may not have considered, it's a bit of a stretch to assume your friends were racially discriminated against. I don't know how many people you're talking about, but assuming it's a relatively small number, the rejection of most/all of your Asian friends to study medicine could just be down to chance.

I would agree for you, except it's well known that Asians are discriminated against in undergrad college admissions, so it's not a stretch for me to imagine the same thing in med school admissions. Indeed, one of the comments replying to me showed MCAT distribution by race for accepted med students is similar to the SAT distribution by race for accepted undergrad students.

Yes but even if it could be confirmed that racial quotas that are significantly unfavourable toward Asian applicants exist for some medical school admissions, that doesn't mean it was the reason for your friends being rejected.

We just don't know if they would have been accepted in an equivalent system without these alleged discriminatory policies, because gaining a medical school offer depends on such a myriad of other factors.