Pre-Med—or Pre-Meditated Mediocrity?

The only gateway to becoming a doctor in America is going through medical school. Considered a sacred path by our country’s best and brightest, our federal government’s regulated investment in medical education has resulted in amazing amounts of public funding being pumped towards medical schools, including over $340 million from taxpayers to just one medical school (UNC Medical School) for medical research, and other billions of dollars to many other medical schools across the nation.

Such public funding reflects the immense amount of prestige we confer upon medical school enrollees—meaning that we need to ensure that students have every opportunity to compete fairly for them and that they are the best qualified to go.

Unfortunately, the process for applying to medical school has become muddled recently as undergraduate institutions—especially those that serve as feeder institutions to medical schools—have disinvested from arranging students to become doctors and instead invested in priorities like DEI. My experience running Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, an alumni group dedicated to reforming my alma mater Davidson College, shows this. Davidson, a self-described feeder undergraduate school for prominent medical programs across the country, brags on its website about its 66 percent acceptance rate to medical schools. But that statistic conceals the reality that students are often forced to add extra studies on their own dime to get into a position where they can compete for medical school.

A senior student at Davidson College, Hannah, tells me that the glut of students aspiring to medical school is so high compared to the supply of teaching faculty that she was routinely denied essential Pre-Med classes in her freshman and sophomore years, contributing to her decision to quit the aspiration.

“When I have talked to students about this issue they say that the issue has only gotten worse and this is the hardest time to get into classes that you need,” Hannah tells me in an interview.

Another student at Davidson must take pre-med courses at a nearby school, UNC-Charlotte, in part due to lack of supply at Davidson. He pays about $4,000 a semester out of his own pocket to do so. Five students, all on the pre-med track at Davidson, told our board that summer classes to take extra courses at George Washington University can cost as much as $25,000 for a summer.

Do students need to be qualified to attend medical school? Yes. Do they need to show they can endure a difficult medical education? Absolutely. But when a student is spending two or three years post-college scrambling for an education, on their own dime, we have a real problem of lack of preparation at the undergraduate level at hand.

In 2024, Davidson College hired a Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion, and one with a solid background in chemistry at that. This comes directly after it dissolved its neuroscience major in 2022, citing an inability to recruit advisors.  One student at Davidson was forced to transition out of the major into psychology because of the shifting institutional priorities, much to her chagrin and fear for not achieving her ambition. When students are being denied essential pre-med classes because of a lack of faculty who are willing to teach them, should DEI really take institutional precedence over helping students succeed in the sciences? But the priorities of such institutions is, as usual, DEI rather than building a student’s professional capabilities in an efficient manner.

It is not just North Carolina’s pre-eminent undergrad institutions that are underserving doctor candidates. Our medical schools themselves signal wrongheaded priorities by overtly focusing on DEI in admissions and medical training. Until it revoked it in 2023, UNC Medical School had a “Task Force” for Social Justice listing over 70 institutional priorities that reflected a DEI, “woke” outlook on science, including the notion that “racism” causes health disparities, not a person’s own genetics or lifestyle. Because of a joint activist effort against it, UNC rescinded those guidelines, but the staff who supported it remain.

More practically harmful are medical schools’ usage of differing standards for different races to admit students. It is no secret that you need a high GPA and high MCAT scores to get into a solid medical school. However, new diversity regimes artificially ensure that black and Hispanic minorities get preferential access to medical schools while others who worked to obtain the requisite GPA and MCAT requirements are often shafted for a highly limited number of spots.

One of these students is a friend of mine of Indian descent living in North Carolina. Despite having scored an impressive 520 out of 528 on the MCAT (good for any elite medical school) and a GPA that was a little below the median GPA of those accepted, he found himself waitlisted at UNC Medical School a few days ago. The disorientation that met his rejection, combined with the opacity of the letter, left him no recourse. Understandably, not all students who meet the requisites can get in, but students like my friend should get a thorough explanation. Were his extracurriculars not impressive enough? Or was it actual racial discrimination?

Certainly, the major public funding that North Carolinians put into the school means it has the resources to give transparent, detailed follow-ups about applications that high-achieving students have prepared their lives for—rather than, say, investing in yet another DEI officer. The recent victory for Students for Fair Admissions over Harvard University and UNC-Chapel Hill, in the 2023 Supreme Court case, has finally emboldened students to speak out, and my friend is considering joining to restore fairness and transparency in medical admissions.

There is no question: a medical education is a worthy ambition. Yet our nation’s feeder institutions are ignoring their responsibility to prepare their students for it. By limiting resources, focusing on woke institutional priorities, and further discouraging applicants with a potentially discriminatory admissions process, they are hampering the success of our high-achievers, and contributing to a less healthy future. As I said in a former article: if you’re going to do science, do science, don’t mess around with distractions.

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