What are all of your thoughts on this recent study in JAMA? Found that Black medical students were 5.3x more likely to come from affluent backgrounds, Latino 6.6x, White 4.8x, and Asian 2.3x. How are we helping disadvantaged students if this is the case? Cliff notes: https://sahanjournal.com/health/university-of-minnesota-medical-school-study/ Original article: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2790107 < my thoughts are this is a very big problem. 1, your sample size for black medical students and latino medical student is super small and biased as the other person pointed out. 2. it also means that Chris Rock's joke is true. the joke that for him to live on a certain street in holloywood, he has to be chris rock meanwhile his white neighbors are just regular, everyday people.
"Survivor" bias. It means URMs have to be relatively affluent to even get a chance at medical school. Considering that fewer Blacks and Latinos in general come from less affluent families, it means opportunities are very limited for average students from those groups. This shows that URMs have had to be above average to attain similar outcomes as their peers due to structural barriers. This is what holistic review is meant to address by making sure "distance-traveled" is accounted for. It also shows that race-based affirmative action is negligible in medical school; if it is used, then URMs wouldn't be underrepresented and you wouldn't expect see the variation in affluency would be more representative. >> what do you mean by "above average"? It doesn't sound like the students had higher test scores etc, simply that their family was making >$270k/yr and one would assume they had all opportunities to be able to pay for course prep work, didn't have to work an extra job, etc> Why aren't their more low-income Black and Latino medical students given Blacks and Latinos are far less likely to be affluent? If the current student didn't penalize low-income students so much, Blacks and Latinos would have more representation. It would be better we could devote more societal resources to ensuring that racial groups could have test score parity. Or have all school admissions be by lottery (from pre-K to residency)--then it is truly fair.
So shouldnt we be helping those of low-income instead of focusing solely on race? Current system seems unfair to all < Blacks and Latinos are far more likely to be from low-income households. Focusing on low-income students would actually help Blacks and Latinos more. >> Agree with this. It should be tied to finances. >> Although, If we only consider finances, Blacks and Latinos would be OVERrepresented and Asians and Whites would be UNDERrepresented. < I hope race-based affirmative action dies in the Supreme Court >> hopefully studies like this would help that to happen < so yall are okay with med schools being the way there were before in terms of diversity? < literally the first 2 comments were about includng low-income status which should still help diversity
sample size was 1943 for non-Hispanic black students amd 3310 for Hispanic students of any race. Is that really that low? The study captured nearly 46.5% of matriculating med students. Speaking just to black citizens, they make up a small portion of the country and therefore a likely even smaller portion of med school classes. Nearly 2k students seems like a lot? I'm legitimately asking if someone can break down why this a is a "super small" dataset as I'm not as confident on stats