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Notes -
Revealed preferences in the real world: black doctors.
I wonder if anyone has studied this? What is going to happen to all the black doctors who are being admitted to med school with inferior credentials and who will likely be socially promoted through residency/licensing as well.
I'm sure a large degree of affirmative action has already affected the supply of doctors, but the post-Great Awokening world seems to have taken that to a new level. Apparently rates of test-failing have increased by nearly 10x in some subjects at UCLA's medical school post 2020.
https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1793657774767022569
This is obviously forbidden information. I wonder how many schools will simply cover it up and graduate people as normal despite failures.
I hate to say it, but if I or a loved one was seriously ill, I would try my best to get a non-black doctor. If I wanted the best, I'd probably follow Peter Griffin's advice. I imagine others have similar revealed preferences that we would never admit in public. In the future, will black doctors magically have tons of open appointments while the cue to see Dr. Rosenblatt grows ever longer? I think probably.
It's irrelevant because no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials. Maybe fail rates are higher at UCLA but UCLA is hard to get into to begin with, so I imagine the coursework is harder than at a place like NEOMED. And there are already schools of osteopathy that seem to attract people who couldn't get into MD programs. I'd be willing to bet that if I were to take a random poll few people would be able to tell me where their doctor even went to med school let alone how highly that school is regarded or what their grades were. Like almost everything else, once you get your first job your education is pretty much irrelevant.
You'd be surprised how much academic pedigree "matters," plenty of people don't care but you'll find soccer moms, educated people, the neurotic and all kinds of others very insistent on a "good doctor from a good school with good reviews on google," despite how often many of those disconnect from reality. For us it can matter because certain of jobs (like being a program director) may be essentially closed off to you without training at a "good" institution. Now, again this isn't necessarily reality based but it matters to a lot of people.
What you might find more interesting is that programs don't really work like undergrad or other fields. The preclinical half of med school is essentially the same country wide, in a large part because students have settled on a half dozen ultra high quality learning resources and ignore whatever the hell their school is trying to do. Pass rates for the exams (which can be using standardized exams but don't need to be) and boards (standardized) are higher at higher tier schools because the students are better. Therefore fail rates jumping is a huge huge black mark.
The other half of medical school is clinicals which uses standardized exams and evaluations from preceptors to determine your grade. The evaluations can get more program dependent and may actually have deflation, but this is also where variation in educational quality comes in since most schools pre-clinicals are basically the same* these days.
This is a gross simplification but for the purposes of this discussion should do.
So to speak
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