Opinion: Affirmative action doesn’t hurt white medical school applicants

Six in 10 medical school applicants end up with nothing more than a pile of rejection letters after pouring their hearts and souls into studying, volunteering, researching, and more. A few understand that their quest was a long shot. Many others start looking for reasons why they didn’t get in. Was it low test scores? Not enough volunteer time? Or was affirmative action the culprit?

Lively — and often bitter — threads on studentdoctor.net and Reddit condemn the use of affirmative action in medical school applications, usually with claims that black or Hispanic students got in while white students, with the same or higher scores, were rejected. Despite the social, capital, and educational advantages of growing up white, these gripers seem to believe that the world has suddenly flipped and being white is holding them back.

Many look past the importance of hard-to-quantify factors for getting into medical school like research, volunteering, recommendations, essays, and interviews and (MCAT) and lower grade point averages (GPAs).