The real answer here is to increase medical school places. Reduced competition would lower the stakes in admissions, and more doctors would increase the number available to poorer communities.
Usual problem of the 21st century that we end up fighting over the pie rather than growing the pie.
I never saw anyone suggest such a thing. Experiences increase your abilities. This is such an odd thing to argue about.
Think about who gains from creating scarcity of pie.
There’s your answer.
It is equally important to increase and subsidize vastly more residencies, especially in primary care areas like family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, ob gyn and psychiatry.
So perhaps the real answer for Harvard is to increase the size of its incoming classes, with a similar change to the size of the school itself.
Totally agree that we need to be investing more in medical education, but we’re never going to get to the point where qualified medical school candidates don’t vastly outnumber places available. And even if we did, some schools would still be perceived as more prestigious and desirable than other, so there would still be competition to get into those.
Granted, but do you have any evidence that students who are good at sport or music, or identify as underrepresented minorities, or are children of graduates of the same institution do better at university?
Or indeed that students who struggled to get there do better? If I had to guess I’d say they probably do worse, since besides having to work, they likely have less support, may be less prepared, and probably feel out of place among more privileged students.
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t attend a given university, but it’s not the same argument.
Well, someone who grew up in Appalachia or an urban slum who is a qualified candidate to attend Harvard certainly did overcome significant challenges. But their experience also gives them abilities that most Harvard students don’t have.
It’s not about “doing better at the university”. It’s about becoming a leader after leaving the university.
The second paragraph notes a real potential problem; there are certainly cases of colleges erring too much on the side of racial and economic diversity, so that they end up admitting students who really aren’t capable of doing the work, which is a bad outcome for everybody involved.
But the second paragraph misses the point entirely. The point of college isn’t to get good grades, it’s to prepare for a career. Old med school joke: “What do you call the guy who had the lowest GPA in his class?” “Doctor”
Yes; for a lot of the hardcore socialist types, capitalism and class are the sole cause of everything wrong with the world, and if we get rid of those things all other issues like sexism, racism and so forth will fix themselves because the cause is gone. They are at best dismissive of social issues, and often disinterested in reform attempts because as far as they are concerned if it’s not part of the great struggle for socialism it simply doesn’t matter.
I mean, yeah, of course lowering your standards from 800 to 700 is a cost. How is that even controversial?
You could say it is a small cost compared to the large benefit of a more diverse student body. If that was what you said, I’d even agree with you.
I mean, ever since the SAT score rebalancing, Harvard could have completely filled its freshman class with students who scored 800 on the SATs, and has never chosen to do so. They don’t even take a lot of kids with 800 on the SATs. I guess that’s a cost. 
It’s a tiny cost compared to a large and obvious benefit of diversity. Like, even diversity of academic excellence, ignoring any other merit, would suggest not just picking the highest SAT scores.
I’m curious as to why you posted this in this way, because the framing implies you think it disagrees with what I said, or that I would disagree with it.
This of course is a big argument against affirmative action. Do you really want a less skilled doctor than you could have had? I think there’s a decent argument for affirmative action in selecting doctors and teachers, since they have to interact with the public, but for something like airline pilots I want the one who did best on the tests and training, irrespective of whether they look like me.
Because i think the cost is so negligible that it’s silly to even talk about it.
Again, you’re assuming without evidence that there is a predictable linear relation between academic achievement and professional competence.
And the other planes can just sit on the ground until the bestest pilots aren’t busy I guess.
Whereas I think it’s pretty silly to say “if we focus on qualifications other than academics we will still have the most academically qualified candidates possible” just because of some weird inability to cede any ground whatsoever.
We can decide that it’s worth it without pretending that there’s no price at all.
Agreed.
I’m assuming the institutions in charge of training doctors and determining if they are qualified to practice are using measures that are at least decently predictive of their professional competence.
Speaking of evidence:
Do either of you have any evidence of this? It sounds implausible to me.
You keep saying this. Do you have evidence it’s true?