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Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. So you don't get into Harvard and you have to go to a state school or whatever, that's not r

Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. So you don't get into Harvard and you have to go to a state school or whatever, that's not really an impediment to your life and career unless you want to become a congressman or a supreme court justice or whatever. Where it does bother me is med school. I've seen several of my Asian friends who were just ridiculously obviously great applicants either fail to get into med school or struggle to get into med school over several years. I'm not talking about someone who you see and think "yeah he could be a doctor", I'm talking about someone who you see and think "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 my friends of other races who seemed similarly qualified to me had no trouble getting in on their first try. And getting into med school or not is a big fucking deal. In some cases, we're turning away people who would be incredible doctors and making them pursue other careers, which is a huge waste. Those are just anecdotes of course, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed the same thing.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
geographomics 11y ago
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.
- streptomycin 11y ago
  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.
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    > 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.
    - streptomycin 11y ago
      Yeah, real intellectuals only communicate by exchanging peer-reviewed publications. Besides that, they're basically mimes.
    - maratd 11y ago
      > 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.
  - geographomics 11y ago
    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.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
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.org/data/facts/2007/mcatgparaceeth07.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.o...
- geographomics 11y ago
  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.
  - notsony 11y ago
    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."
    - geographomics 11y ago
      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.
dominotw 11y ago
>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.
- streptomycin 11y ago
  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.
caseysoftware 11y ago
> 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."
- streptomycin 11y ago
  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.
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > 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.
    - 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

geographomics 11y ago

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.

streptomycin 11y ago
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.
- bachmeier 11y ago
  > 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.
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    Yeah, real intellectuals only communicate by exchanging peer-reviewed publications. Besides that, they're basically mimes.
  - maratd 11y ago
    > 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.
- geographomics 11y ago
  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.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

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.org/data/facts/2007/mcatgparaceeth07.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.o...

geographomics 11y ago
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.
- notsony 11y ago
  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."
  - geographomics 11y ago
    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.

dominotw 11y ago

>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.

streptomycin 11y ago
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.

caseysoftware 11y ago

> 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."

streptomycin 11y ago
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.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > 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.
  - 11y ago