Wand: Discrimination by design? Race-based admissions in Canadian medical and law schools

2026/02/28 Leave a comment

While I largely disagree with the recommendations, good to have this data analysis on the impact of these preferences:

…Key findings include:

• In nine of 14 schools, the non-racial-minority, or non-Black, non-Indigenous applicant group had the lowest acceptance rates. Even among the five remaining schools where the “Discretionary” and “Black” applicant racial groups had the lowest acceptance rates, those rates were much higher than if the applicants from these two groups had been required to compete against all applicants, regardless of race.

• Thirteen schools (with two exceptions for LSAT-specific analysis) admitted fewer non-racial-minority or non-Black, non-Indigenous applicants than would have been the case had they selected applicants according to their top-ranked academic performance.

• Further analysis showed that 216 applicants or 10 per cent were admitted with lower grades out of 2,150 medical and law school first-year students who were all from designated racial minority applicant groups. A similar admission pattern was also observed for LSAT/MCAT scores, with 132 racial minority applicants admitted with lower scores, or 6.1 per cent of the total number of admitted students. This analysis indicates that race-based admission policies result in the admission of academically weaker students.

• In every school that provided admissions data, the non-racial-minority or non[1]Black, non-Indigenous applicant groups experienced the highest number of rejections despite higher academic scores than the admitted applicant from other racial groups with the lowest academic score from their group.

• Most medical schools and many law schools refused to release their race-based application and admission data at all. This lack of transparency raises serious concerns about accountability in publicly funded institutions.

The implications are troubling. Institutional racism potentially erodes fairness and undermines public confidence in our standards for medical and legal education. Such racism is also remarkably resistant to scrutiny – operating behind policies that limit access to basic admissions data.

These findings give some specificity to broader concerns about DEI in Canadian universities and colleges, where critics have raised alarms about the growth of DEI bureaucracies, opaque hiring policies, and admission practices that prioritize group identity over merit.

Canada also stands out internationally. University officials in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands reported that race is not considered in admissions decisions for medical or law schools.

Policy recommendations to address the racial segregation and discrimination identified in this report include:

• Provincial governments should prohibit the use of race as an admissions criterion in medical and law schools.

• To restore academic rigour, these schools should rely exclusively on objective measures such as the MCAT, LSAT, and required prerequisite coursework. Provinces should consider suspending funding to medical and law schools that continue to factor race into admissions decisions.

• In addition, provinces that continue to consider race in medical and law school admissions should be required to publicly release race-based application and admission data using consistent, transparent measures of discrimination, preferably measures similar to the measures used in this study. Without this disclosure, governments cannot effectively oversee or correct the disturbing trend of racial discrimination that threatens the overall academic strength of our medical and law students.

Recent public debates in Canada, including high-profile campus protests, faculty resignations over DEI mandates, and legislative scrutiny of “equity hires,” reflect growing concern that universities are straying from their core missions under the banner of DEI. Rather than sorting applicants by racial category, universities should focus on ensuring that all prospective students, regardless of race, have the academic preparation needed to compete fairly. This includes access to tutoring, frequent testing, and meaningful academic feedback well before the application stage….

Source: Discrimination by design? Race-based admissions in Canadian medical and law schools

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Clark: Sprinkle a little notwithstanding on every governing headache [medical schools and mobility rights]

2024/11/09 Leave a comment

Clever critique:

…That implies its use should be judicious, and not an easy shortcut to a policy goal. Yet there has been a growing willingness to use it to brush aside Charter inconveniences – sometimes to replace the need to file a court appeal or draft new legislation that meets a policy objective without unreasonably infringing on Charter rights.

It’s true that Quebec’s political culture is different. For a period after the 1982 repatriation of the Constitution, the Parti Québécois government invoked the clause on every bill as a protest. There was never as much of a taboo on the use of the notwithstanding clause.

But Mr. Legault has in the past used it to override the enshrined rights in Quebec’s own Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, too. It has become an easy reflex.

Source: Sprinkle a little notwithstanding on every governing headache

Filed under Other Tagged with , ,

Urback: A hard diversity quota for medical-school admissions is a terrible, counterproductive idea

2024/10/21 Leave a comment

Lot’s of (negative) commentary on the latest TMU initiative.

…All of this is in service to a genuinely noble goal. But the school’s execution – it’s practically boasting of its lax admission requirements – is clumsy, short-sighted and does a disservice to its own prospective students. The unintended consequences are obvious: Canadian patients will start Googling their physician’s educational background and wonder if the resident doctor performing their next procedure was one of the TMU students who got into med school with an art-history degree, a 3.3 GPA and a compelling personal essay. Indeed, the school’s quota system will inevitably condemn all of its graduates to public skepticism about their qualifications and capabilities, even if the physicians TMU produces are in fact very capable, qualified and skilled. It’s a bias of the school’s own making that it will have to fight to counter, and probably lose anyway….

Source: A hard diversity quota for medical-school admissions is a terrible, counterproductive idea

What is striking about most of the similar commentary I have seen, is that most do not look at what the data says about med school diversity. Earlier and the most recent study I found show largely an issue for Blacks and Indigenous; Chinese and South Asians are over-represented, whites under-represented.The latest analysis of diversity among medical students (English universities) that I found shows that:

A total of 1388 students responded to the survey, representing a response rate of 16.6%. Most respondents identified as women (63.1%) and were born after 1989 (82.1%). Respondents were less likely, compared to the Canadian Census population, to identify as black (1.7% vs 6.4%) (P < 0.001) or Aboriginal (3.5% vs. 7.4%) (P < 0.001), and have grown up in a rural area (6.4% vs. 18.7%) (P < 0.001). Respondents had higher socioeconomic status, indicated by parental education (29.0% of respondents’ parents had a master’s or doctoral degree, compared to 6.6% of Canadians aged 45–64), occupation (59.7% of respondents’ parents were high-level managers or professionals, compared to 19.2% of Canadians aged 45–64), and income (62.9% of respondents grew up in households with income >$100,000/year, compared to 32.4% of Canadians). [2016 census]

Source: Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of Canadian medical students: a cross-sectional study

Filed under Admissability, bias, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , , ,