Opinion: Free tuition won’t fix medicine’s diversity problem without admissions reform
Medical students at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York City gathered last week to hear a life-changing announcement: Ruth Gottesman revealed she would be donating $1 billion, ensuring no student at Einstein will pay tuition ever again.
Leadership at Albert Einstein School of Medicine celebrated the donation as a means to attract a more diverse student body. Improving diversity in the nation’s physician workforce is a public health imperative. Forty years of affirmative action policies were unable to compensate for the devastating impact of the 1910 Flexner Report, which led to the mass closure of medical schools that admitted Black students, and an estimated loss of 35,000 Black physicians into the field. Despite the urgency of improving diversity in our physician workforce, the number of applicants from Black, Hispanic, and other underrepresented groups in medicine being admitted to medical school has decreased in the United States. Black/African American, low-family income, and first-generation students are less likely to be admitted to M.D.-Ph.D. programs, despite being as qualified or more qualified than other applicants. In trying to explain these gaps, as well as the shortage of students interested in entering primary care, experts often point to the high cost of medical school. But the truth is more complicated than that. Simply going tuition-free cannot address entrenched issues of racial and socioeconomic disparities in medical school admissions.
