Most people think affirmative action in medical school admission ended in 1978 when Allen Bakke won a reverse discrimination case against the Regents of the University of California.
Racial preferences are very much alive in American medical education.
Yet, not only is the practice bad for medicine, but the rationale for racial preferences withers under scrutiny. In 1995 Rob Farmer, then 34, applied to UMSM, his hometown medical school. Raised in near-poverty by a single mother, he left home after high school and worked his way through college. He scored a very respectable 80th percentile on the MCATs. Yet his application for the UMSM class of 2000 was rejected.