Explanation Of URM

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
Status
Not open for further replies.
another URM thread? If I had a nickel........
Members don't see this ad.
 
Please take the time to become informed about the issues surrounding Underrepresented Minorities in Medicine:

APIAHF Comments to AAMC Regarding Definition of Underrepresented Minority

The Case For Affirmative Action

The Case Against Affirmative Action

More Battles Looming Over Affirmative Action

AAMC: A word from the President, "Meeting the Diversity Challenge"

Tracking Minority Medical Students (by specialty and area of practice) pgs. 51-52

Medical Association Apologizes for History of Prejudice

What are Health Disparities?

America Needs a More Diverse Physician Workforce

UC Davis court case: Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

After Affirmative Action: Diversity at California Medical Schools

The Consequences of Premature Abandonment of Affirmative Action in Medical School Admissions

Student Body Racial and Ethnic Composition and Diversity-Related Outcomes in US Medical Schools

Enhancing the Diversity of the Pediatrician Workforce

Patient-Physician Racial Concordance and the Perceived Quality and Use of Health Care

The Case for Diversity in Academic Internal Medicine

Who Gets In?
 
Members don't see this ad :)
A black man was just elected into the most powerful position in the world. It is official, whites have no upper hand in anything, and there is no need for AA to try and balance things out. No one can talk about different races having different opportunities anymore without remembering who the president is.

And the racial make-up of many med schools is not at all proportional to the number of premedical students at all. The elite universities brag about their 50% minority class. Are you trying to tell me that half of the applicants to med school are minorities? Sorry, but no one would say that is true.

Why in the world would we let a certain number of a certain race in just to make sure their race is respected??? One of the most ludicrous claims I've heard on SDN. Is the field of medicine a charity, or non-profit organization with the goal of giving respect to minorities??? No, the field of medicine heals disease.

Like I've said before, you can read the reason for AAMCs love for minorities in medicine. It is a downright fallacy that assumes you can only treat patients from your own race.
 
dothesafetydanc said:
I think the idea is that if there isn't a concerted push to put URMs in certain positions and portray them in a positive light, then it will never happen because of the insular nature of certain institutions. And while Aff. Action might be unfair, it will only be temporary until minorities are represented respective to their population percentage makeup. After these crutches are removed, hopefully, minorities will be as equally competitive in terms of application stats.
Click to expand...

Agreed. the affirmative action system is not exactly "fair". But I do see how this will help minorities move up the socioeconomic ladder. if more minority is represented in the professionals (med, law, scientists, etc), it would be a very powerful driving force for minority youths to go into these fields.

Mind you almost every educational institution from high school to grad schools employ affirmative action. just that medical school is so competitive that many qualified applicants are downed down. therefore the URM issue is more pronounced.

But think about this idea i have. In a hypothetical situation, if a school with affirmative action is composed of 15% URM instead of 3% that it would otherwise accept without affirmative action. The chance of URM getting in increased by 500% (who, i'm sure, are qualified to be doctors), where as non-URM only lose about 15% chance to get in. so non-URM is not hurt as much as we think. (and poor white-men always have that "disadvantaged" box to check on AMCAS).

So over all, although i think it's certainly a flawed system, it's not as bad as we like to think it is.

Now the real problem is for the US to actually have enough medical school spots to fill its own demand for doctors, and those qualified can actually get in without the angst of this ridiculously competitive process...

by the way i'm east-asian.:thumbup:
 
AZFutureDoc said:
A black man was just elected into the most powerful position in the world. It is official, whites have no upper hand in anything, and there is no need for AA to try and balance things out. No one can talk about different races having different opportunities anymore without remembering who the president is.

And the racial make-up of many med schools is not at all proportional to the number of premedical students at all. The elite universities brag about their 50% minority class. Are you trying to tell me that half of the applicants to med school are minorities? Sorry, but no one would say that is true.

Why in the world would we let a certain number of a certain race in just to make sure their race is respected??? One of the most ludicrous claims I've heard on SDN. Is the field of medicine a charity, or non-profit organization with the goal of giving respect to minorities??? No, the field of medicine heals disease.

Like I've said before, you can read the reason for AAMCs love for minorities in medicine. It is a downright fallacy that assumes you can only treat patients from your own race.
Click to expand...

Opinion noted.
 
I love how everyone says that AA hurts the white man, but thats not true. According to most studies, the white composition did not change(+/-1-3%) in schools that had and then repealed AA.

In the end, AA hurts Asians the most, and thats were I think the fallacy of AA arises. It is a known fact that Asians(Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Middle Easterns) have the hardest time of getting into medical school, despite, in all metrics(MCAT, GPA, and even ECs), being the most qualified. Medical schools like to brag about diversity, but then they specifically disqualify/negagate Asian applicants by using subjective and nondisclosed rating factors, even though Asians have as much to offer in terms of diversity and face as much discrimination as African Americans and Hispanics. If anything, these Asian communities probably add more to the diversity equation, since so many Asian applicants are first generation immigrants that not only have better stats and are inherently more qualified, but in general, usually speak at least 2 languages(English and their ethnic language). Thus, they are in a position, say relative to African-American, to better relate and understand immigrant populations, which are making up a larger and larger percentage of underserved.

Furthermore, last I check, medicine was about the health of people, not about enacting social policy. If you want to do AA, you do it at the bottom level, ie, send URMs to go public elementary, middle, and high schools(busing) or provide them with funds to attend private schools. In addition, AA cheats URMs to some extent as well, since it favors the segments of the URM populations, which are already well off (ie, middle class and wealthy). That’s why if there has to be an AA system, it should be based on economics. It would still be tilted towards helping URMs, but it would help those that deserve it more.

Btw, does someone have actually have the stats on the percentage of URM physicians that actually go back and practice in underserved areas? Im just curious if the number is high enough to justify rejecting more qualified applicants and the subsequent externalities(ie, increase insurance costs due to less qualified physicians and more malpractice claims, as well as the costs of to create and maintain the infrastructural systems and special programs that undergraduate and medical schools use to recruit, retain, and ensure the success of URMs).
 
What is the point of this thread?
 
batman1983 said:
...Btw, does someone have actually have the stats on the percentage of URM physicians that actually go back and practice in underserved areas? ...
Click to expand...

Tracking Minority Medical Students (by specialty and area of practice) pgs. 51-52

I highly suggest checking out those links I posted earlier. They will answer a lot of questions and address many of the same viewpoints overheard on these forums.
batman1983 said:
...In the end, AA hurts Asians the most, and thats were I think the fallacy of AA arises. It is a known fact...
Click to expand...

Again, please read the article posted at the following link: APIAHF Comments to AAMC Regarding Definition of Underrepresented Minority
 
Last edited:
HeatherMD said:
Isn't anyone else worried about societal perception of black doctors if there's many of them and we KNOW they didn't have to match the stats of the white doctor next door to get into med school?

Why isn't anyone concerned about THAT?
Click to expand...

Minority doctors still have to pass all the same exams and boards. You should really be fighting the admissions of doctors's kids and the well-connected. For every slightly unqualified minority student taking a spot away from a qualified white/asian applicant, there are 3 woefully unqualified doctors' kids taking a spot.
 
This is how I look at affirmative action, and I find it much less frustrating and now it makes perfect sense to me.

Certain ethnic groups (black, hispanic, native American) are UNDERREPRESENTED (first word in URM) in medicine. There are x percent of that ethnicity in the country but a much smaller percentage of doctors of that ethnicity. The purpose of giving an advantage to URMs is to increase the percentage of doctors from that ethnicity.

Why do they do this? Some believe affirmative action was originally put in place for the applicant - they "deserve" a chance so they were given a leg up. I've never actually seen any documentation to support this.

Others say its to increase the number of doctors in underserved areas - but everyone knows this doesn't work so thats not really it either.

So here is how I think of it - and affirmative action no longer makes me angry.

Don't look at Affirmative action as for the student - look at is as for the average patient in the general populace. It makes much more sense that way. So for example, lets use African Americans. As an average African American, I probably would want someone I could identify with as a doctor (just like a female might want a female doctor, a male might want a male doctor, you may even shop around til' you find a doctor you have something in common with). As an African American patient, it only seems right I should have the opportunity to have a doctor that I am comfortable with - and if that means having an African American doctor then so be it. But for that to happen there need to be more African American doctors in the country.

The URM student is just the means by which more doctors are made available to that population.

And sure we could all say race doesn't matter but we all know that unfortunately in our country it still does. Sure we just elected a black president, but if race actually didn't matter that wouldn't be the big deal that it is. So don't make a fuss - it is what it is.
 
Reverse Racism on white people!!!!!

You say that minorities are being favored unfairly? Yet you haven't even put yourself into a position of being the best among your peers.

Hmmm. Affirmative action is a flawed system, yet the educational system is also flawed. SOMETIMES different races have different opportunities at education. SOMETIMES (again, not all the time) there is superior school systems for different neighborhoods, private schools.

Lets face it, money gives you more educational options. And again, minorities in general weren't given the same opportunities in the 1960s that they are now.

SO... although the system is flawed it is just an attempt to correct prejudice that can exist in some instances.

Final point...

If you are getting a B- on a test and get declined, while another guy gets a B- and gets accepted. What do you do?

Do you complain that you got a B- and so did he, so you both should be let in? Or do you realize that 90% of the other people who got into schools were scoring an A- or above and try to do that!

When Jackie Robinson made the major leagues in the 1947 he couldn't say to the coach, "I'm as good as your worst player! This isn't fair, I should be in there!" NOPE. He had to be better than 90% of the league. Why? Because he was black. If he took complaints that he was just as good as the guy on the bench to the commissioner of baseball would people know his name today? NOPE. He had to strive to be better.

Can you imagine this guy going around saying I'm at the bottom tier of acceptances! Why can't I get in? Why can't I play on the baseball team!?

Go read his biography and your learn a little bit about discrimination

From Time magazine (http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/robinson01.html)

Jackie Robinson had to be bigger than life. He had to be bigger than the Brooklyn teammates who got up a petition to keep him off the ball club, bigger than the pitchers who threw at him or the base runners who dug their spikes into his shin, bigger than the bench jockeys who hollered for him to carry their bags and shine their shoes, bigger than the so-called fans who mocked him with mops on their heads and wrote him death threats.
When Branch Rickey first met with Jackie about joining the Dodgers, he told him that for three years he would have to turn the other cheek and silently suffer all the vile things that would come his way. Believe me, it wasn't Jackie's nature to do that. He was a fighter, the proudest and most competitive person I've ever seen. This was a man who, as a lieutenant in the Army, risked a court-martial by refusing to sit in the back of a military bus. But when Rickey read to him from The Life of Christ, Jackie understood the wisdom and the necessity of forbearance.
To this day, I don't know how he withstood the things he did without lashing back. I've been through a lot in my time, and I consider myself to be a patient man, but I know I couldn't have done what Jackie did. I don't think anybody else could have done it. Somehow, though, Jackie had the strength to suppress his instincts, to sacrifice his pride for his people's. It was an incredible act of selflessness that brought the races closer together than ever before and shaped the dreams of an entire generation.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
kavorca said:
Minority doctors still have to pass all the same exams and boards. You should really be fighting the admissions of doctors's kids and the well-connected. For every slightly unqualified minority student taking a spot away from a qualified white/asian applicant, there are 3 woefully unqualified doctors' kids taking a spot.
Click to expand...
I have yet to see any evidence that these doctors kids are underqualified. Every single physicians child I know who has any pretensions of actually getting into medical school is hard-working, has amazingly good grades, went to a good undergrad, and the ones I know who have taken it scored pretty damn well on the MCAT. And I know quite a few physicians children.

Do you have any evidence at all backing up your claims? Those of us who debate URM qualifications have numbers straight from the horses mouth (the AAMC)
 
Raryn said:
I have yet to see any evidence that these doctors kids are underqualified.
Click to expand...

Agreed. As far as I know, being a doctor's kid can actually hurt you if you don't explain your motivation to go into medicine well enough. the applicant pool is filled with doctor's kids. and the Adcom naturally (and reasonably) suspect that a doctor's kid is applying because his parents wants him to.

I'm a doctor's kid. Got this info from my PI at work, who's been on an ADCOM.
 
alwaysaangel said:
This is how I look at affirmative action, and I find it much less frustrating and now it makes perfect sense to me.

Certain ethnic groups (black, hispanic, native American) are UNDERREPRESENTED (first word in URM) in medicine. There are x percent of that ethnicity in the country but a much smaller percentage of doctors of that ethnicity. The purpose of giving an advantage to URMs is to increase the percentage of doctors from that ethnicity.

Why do they do this? Some believe affirmative action was originally put in place for the applicant - they "deserve" a chance so they were given a leg up. I've never actually seen any documentation to support this.

Others say its to increase the number of doctors in underserved areas - but everyone knows this doesn't work so thats not really it either.

So here is how I think of it - and affirmative action no longer makes me angry.

Don't look at Affirmative action as for the student - look at is as for the average patient in the general populace. It makes much more sense that way. So for example, lets use African Americans. As an average African American, I probably would want someone I could identify with as a doctor (just like a female might want a female doctor, a male might want a male doctor, you may even shop around til' you find a doctor you have something in common with). As an African American patient, it only seems right I should have the opportunity to have a doctor that I am comfortable with - and if that means having an African American doctor then so be it. But for that to happen there need to be more African American doctors in the country.

The URM student is just the means by which more doctors are made available to that population.

And sure we could all say race doesn't matter but we all know that unfortunately in our country it still does. Sure we just elected a black president, but if race actually didn't matter that wouldn't be the big deal that it is. So don't make a fuss - it is what it is.
Click to expand...

I have two counter arguments/questions to make:

1. How many URM physicians that get in because of their URM stats actually go back to serve in those communities? AA has been a policy among medical schools for the past 30-35yrs, and yet there still is a shortage of physicians in those communities. So its obviously not 100% or even 50%.


2. Would a African American patient that is gravely ill still prefer an African American physician to say a white or Asian physician if he knew that the African American physician was under qualified relative to the white or asian? Yes, they may have passed the same exams, like the MCAT, there is a relative scale. I have a feeling that when someone's own life is on the line, they want every edge the can get to alleviate the situation(ie, best possible physicians, best facilities, etc).

Personally, if Im sick, I want the most qualified physician, not the one I can best relate to. If I wanted a friend, I would get a dog J. I dont care if my physician is white, jewish, black, or asian, as long as I know he is qualified. And thats what I think is the main problem with AA: AA in the end it demeans the accomplishments of URMs that are gifted/qualified. As a volunteer, I have assisted and interacted with patients that specifically questioned and challenged the credentials of URM physicians treating them due to their assumption of AA for their physicians.

To reiterate, Im not against AA, Im just against it on the basis of race. It needs to be based on economic status. Either way, I wouldn’t benefit. However, at least it would be more equitable and merit based. Moreover, it makes more sense to do it at the bottom level(K-12) than at the top level, esp at flagship university programs(Ivies, top public state, and professional schools). If you do at the bottom level, you can get more a return per investment in terms of resources.
 
Last edited:
mcgyver said:
Agreed. As far as I know, being a doctor's kid can actually hurt you if you don't explain your motivation to go into medicine well enough. the applicant pool is filled with doctor's kids. and the Adcom naturally (and reasonably) suspect that a doctor's kid is applying because his parents wants him to.

I'm a doctor's kid. Got this info from my PI at work, who's been on an ADCOM.
Click to expand...
I agree with your statements as well and have experienced this firsthand...
 
We're going to go ahead and close this thread now, since the main question of defining a URM has been well answered for the OP, and the discussion has long since turned turned toward into a debate based on personal opinions of issues that don't answer the question asked.

Topics involving Affirmative Action, and the Underrepresented in Healthcare will continue to be important social issues for some time to come. It would benefit many of us to educate ourselves on the facts. Those who are interested in learning more about both fact and opinion may wish to check out some of the many links the MrMattOglesby posted in this thread. Also, our Topics in Healthcare forums, which has a sub-forum for Under-represented in Healthcare, but covers a much wider array of topics on its main forum, can help familiarize you with a variety of current issues. Finally, conducting a Search on our Main Forums Index will direct you to many threads throughout SDN where affirmative action has been discussed, sometimes productively and sometimes hotly.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Next unread thread

Similar threads

P
URM Clarification
Replies
7
Views
709
Mr.Smile12
Mr.Smile12
C
  • Question
Explanation for Ws and Cs -- is this sufficient?
Replies
4
Views
327
Crying9to5
C
j_diggity
Should I include an explanation of an LOR situation with my update letter?
Replies
2
Views
495
wysdoc
wysdoc
J
  • Locked
Does URM matter anymore?
Replies
5
Views
2K
GoSpursGo
GoSpursGo
Lasofloxabuterol
WAMC 4.0/510 URM
Replies
7
Views
139
Faha
F
Top