US Universities Should be Required to Give Preference to Applicants of Underrepresented Minorities

Let's address Con's issues with my conduct and focus first: Before I accepted the argument, I asked Con the following: "Are you arguing that no university should be required to give preference to URM's? If so, are you including medical universities in this category?" To which Con replied: "Sure." I worded this in this way for a reason. This wording means that if it can be shown that any type of university should be required to give preference to URMs then Con has lost the debate. Con agreed to the idea that his argument must encompass all universities. As to my conduct in terms of giving rebuttals in the first rounds, yes I suppose I broke Con's rule there, but I would suggest that con calling for an automatic win and mischaracterizing my response as only rebuttals is also poor conduct. My response was a good mix of rebuttals and arguments, it just so happens that the arguments I make happen to fit as rebuttals to Con because Con made the same arguments most people who don't understand the benefit of URM preference make. On to the rebuttals: Con accuses me of not explaining why helping patients is preferred when choosing who to admit to a medical school. Should I also explain why food is preferred when hungry? 1: I argued that having classmates of various ethnicities can help reduce biases that students already had before entering medical school, not that physicians face bias. 2: I never said that there would be no black doctors without race based admissions, but there would be fewer of a group that is already significantly underrepresented. This would be bad for the patients as I demonstrated in my opening. 3: I said underserved, not worse. An underserved area is an area where there are too few physicians, typically because physicians do not want to work there. Adding an Emergency Medicine doctor to a place that has too few physicians is going to make a big difference. The white kid who had that spot in medical school and chooses to work in a whitewashed area as a specialist will make almost no difference at all. Medical schools aim to improve patient outcomes, and enrolling people who will go where they are most effective is part of that. 4: I will address this later since it just speaks to the fallacious mismatch argument Con put forth. Unnumbered: There are many problems with Con's thinking here. First, as I already addressed there is an intrinsic benefit to patients from black physicians. These doctors fill an unmet need while white physicians pretty much just fill a job. A great General Practitioner in Harlem makes a hell of a difference while a great Plastic Surgeon in Greenwich makes almost no difference. High tier students typically pursue roles like plastic surgery while mid-low tier students pursue more generalized roles. Both tiers typically end up in slots they are great at, so while the mid tier student might make a pousy plastic surgeon, the student can be a great GP. Second, American medical schools only admit people they think have the potential to be great physicians. Caribbean schools will admit anyone, but if you are accepted into an American medical school they think you can be great. Since these standards remain high, we still have a significant shortage of black physicians despite the bias in admissions. If they would recruit people who would be mediocre physicians, the gap would disappear. I am not sure if you know just how many people apply to medical schools each year, but it is more than twice as many applying as can be accepted. Of those rejected, a significant amount could have made it through medical school, but the bar is set so high that medical schools virtually guarantee that people entering will graduate. Mismatch effect: First off, ignoring a claim is not the same as conceding it. I started off by saying that I lack sufficient information to make any claims about universities other than medical ones. I therefore neither accept nor reject the claims you made about other universities. That said, they are irrelevant to you winning or losing the debate. Based on the terms you agreed to before the debate, if I can show that medical universities should be required to give preference to URMs, I win. You claim that these students would be performing better at different universities if they were matched appropriately. I would like you to demonstrate that claim. Medical school is not like undergrad. In medical school, all students are being prepared for the same board exams. People at Harvard will take the same board exams as people at any state university. In undergrad, yes there are some schools that teach at a higher level than others, but in medical school you are already being taught things at the highest level. Additionally, in undergrad, if you fail out, they just let it happen. In medical school, the school will bust its butt trying to keep you from failing out. There is no reason to suspect a person dropping out of one school would have been successful at another. Overall, Con did absolutely nothing worthwhile to defeat my arguments. All he did was complain about race based admissions, imply that patient outcomes don't matter, and made some unjustified assumptions about how medical school works. Asians: I never suggested we should favor whites over Asians. To recap thus far: Con: 1) Tries to win on a technicality. 2) Does not want to argue on the terms we agreed to before the debate 3) Points out that race based admission is discriminatory(this is a tautology) 4) Since it was shown that black medical students are almost identically likely to graduate as any other race, Con wants to argue that the marginal difference is enough to discount the benefits of having black doctors. 5) Seems to change his mind about whether it is the outcome for the patient that matters most depending on which point he is trying to make. 6) Keeps coming back to the argument that it is unfair to the students, but I already conceded that and said it is irrelevant. Pro: 1) Demonstrated that there are clear advantages for black patients if we increase the number of black physicians both direct(the patients literally have a better outcome with a black doctor because they will trust the doctor more) and indirect (by helping to diminish biases that students bring with them to medical school) 2) Demonstrated that black physicians are of benefit to the community by demonstrating that they will go to the areas most in need of more physicians. 3) Demonstrated that the people admitted to medical school, in general, will be successful. Since the most important role of a medical university is to provide physicians to meet the medical needs of the patients, they should be required to do their best to achieve this goal. Since it can be shown, via the evidence I posted in my opening, that having race based admissions is greatly beneficial to this end, they should be required at medical universities.