Howard (and Meharry), and later their professional schools, were originally established to provide African-Americans with an education that was very largely denied them because of biassed admission policies. In much the same way Albert Einstein School of Medicine (a component of Yeshiva University) was established in the early 1950s to provide an opportuntty for a medical education for Jewish students who largely had to study abroad because of anti-Semitic policies in medical school admissions. Women's Medical College (now MCP-Hahnemann COM) was established to give women (also systematically refused admission) a medical education. Two a year was a common quota!
Anti-Semitism was broken about the time AECOM began operation because a thorough detailed study demonstrated beyond refutation that Jews were frequently rejected with the same or better academic records than accepted non-Jews. Many Jewish applicants resorted to having offical name changes in order to be considered.
The next bar to fall was the one that discriminated against women, sometime in the late 1960's. Now, women make up about half or more of US medical students! Women's Medical College became the coeducational Medical College of Pennsylvania, now MCP-Hahnemann.
The exclusionary barrier against African-Americans began to erode in the mid-1970s, bringing down with it the biassed exclusion of Native Americans and Mexican-Americans.
The great wave of immigration from Asia, the Carribean, South and Central America is largely a post-1970 phenomenon. Thanks to the destruction of those earlier barriers, professional school admissions is open to all who are US citizens or permanent residents.
A chief reason why there are relatively small numbers of non-citizen/non-permanent residents in US professional schools is the unavailability of financial aid or borrowing for this group, as well as the mandate for most state-supported professional schools to have relatively high proportions of legal state residents in their classes.
So, Howard is NOT an African-American medical school. If there is a relatively higher representation of that group in its classes it is mostly because of self-selection: a higher proportion of accepted African-Americans choose to attend if admitted, a higher proportion of non-African-Americans with other options choose not to.
Another bit of history: until about the 1970s it was unusual for applicants over 26 years of age to be accepted to medical school. Since then, 30, 40, 50 year olds find places, their maturity and experience being decidely advantageous, compensating often enough for less than hotshot numbers.
At the present, who gets accepted to a medical school and who does not is not simply a function of the numbers.
"Statistics" are just meaningless numbers without further analysis of their significance. Alternative hypotheses other than the obvious have to be considered. Moreover, a knowledge of history, sociology, psychology and who knows what else is usually required to understand the meaning of the statistics.
For every medical school applicant, courses in statistics, recent American history, sociology, psychology and anthropology might usefully be added to the requirements for admission. It will never happen, I suppose. More's the pity.
