To contest a worldview whose ultimate goal is to destroy merit, schools should double down on objective measurements of student success.
To contest a worldview whose ultimate goal is to destroy merit, schools should double down on objective measurements of student success.
R eports of DEI’s decline are greatly exaggerated.
That’s the sad truth as college and graduate students head to campus for the 2024–25 school year. While a growing number of states are removing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from the classroom and campus experience, most schools still admit students for ideological and racial — not academic — reasons.
State and federal policy-makers should push for meritocracy, and they can start by bringing back testing and grading.
DEI’s most practical impact on higher education has been the lowering of standards. The end goal is to get more black and brown students into the classroom. But many minorities tend to do worse on standardized tests, hurting their chances of admission on a meritocratic basis.
The solutions to this problem include prioritizing outreach and pre-admission assistance in minority communities to cultivate the most qualified candidates. We should also tackle the complex reasons for this disparity — from low-quality primary and secondary education to fewer financial resources.
But instead of tackling root causes, activists have taken the easy road: destroying measures of objective performance.
They’ve succeeded across higher education. Over 80 percent of America’s four-year colleges no longer require applicants to take the SAT or ACT, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, including prominent schools such as Harvard and Princeton. At the graduate level, the American Bar Association has ended requirements that applicants take the LSAT — also on diversity grounds.
Activists are now pushing for medical schools to waive the MCAT, even though the test broadly predicts how a student will fare. The University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, where I worked for 50 years, already waives the test for some students who attended historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Even where the MCAT is still in place, so-called “holistic review” downgrades the importance of test scores and grade-point averages, with the seeming imprimatur of the powerful and pro-DEI Association of American Medical Colleges.
The medical profession shows how far the anti-test and -grade crusade has gone — and how dangerous it is. With the MCAT either gone or diminished as a standard for admission, medical schools have indeed become more diverse, but likely at the cost of student quality.
Every week, I speak with medical educators who attest to this reality. A whistleblower at UCLA’s medical school has revealed that over 50 percent of students now fail internal standardized tests called “shelf exams” — a tenfold increase since 2020. That’s especially concerning because a passing score only means performing better than the lowest 5 percent of national test takers.
How have activists responded to the problems they’ve created? By destroying even more objective measures to cover their tracks.
Medical schools have almost universally moved to a pass/fail grading system in students’ first two years, which are focused entirely on pre-clinical medical knowledge. Yet that’s where grading matters most. Numerical grades demonstrate which students are most likely to succeed — and which students are struggling. DEI activists don’t want that sunshine because they fear it will make many minority students look bad.
Lower-performing students still risked being discovered when they took the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, which largely dictates residency assignments. So in 2022, the test’s administrators moved the test’s first (and most reliable) part to a pass/fail system, while explicitly noting that numerical scores hurt diversity.
Never mind that such moves encourage medical students to study less, since their grades don’t matter as much. And never mind that test scores are proven to impact patient outcomes. By lowering standards, DEI activists are lowering the quality of American medicine itself. And what’s true for medicine is true for the rest of higher education.
At its core, DEI destroys the merit that colleges and graduate schools are supposed to discover and direct for society’s benefit. State and federal leaders should end this crisis, especially because taxpayers fund large percentages of almost every college and university, both public and private.
Policy-makers should condition taxpayer support, including student loans, on whether an institution requires standardized testing and uses numerical grading. They should also limit or end the use of holistic admissions, which schools can use to get around objective measures such as testing.
Colleges and universities, along with national organizations that administer many tests, will fight these reforms tooth and nail. But lawmakers should force that discussion. Let the National Board of Medical Examiners explain why standards should be lower when lives are on the line. Good luck defending that.
The ultimate goal should be truly meritocratic higher education. That would powerfully limit “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which struggles to exist where meritocracy reigns.
Most important, it would redirect higher education to shared human progress, instead of the lowly and divisive pursuit of racial spoils.