America’s medical schools tiptoe away from DEI — for now

The Fourth of July is America’s 250th birthday, but we’ve already received an early gift. 

As of Wednesday, America’s medical schools are no longer being forced to teach discriminatory and divisive DEI ideology to the next generation of physicians — after months of public and political pressure, including from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department. 

This largely under-the-radar shift will benefit all Americans’ health and well-being: Now, tomorrow’s doctors can focus all their attention on treating patients equally, and with excellent care.

On July 1, new accreditation standards go into effect for the United States’ 162 MD- and 46 DO-granting medical schools.

The separate accrediting organizations that govern them issue educational standards that all member schools must uphold. 

And in recent months both organizations have heavily rewritten their standards, completely ditching so-called “diversity, equity and inclusion” mandates. 

These mandates emphasize political indoctrination over health education — and have no place in the training of doctors.

Consider the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the powerful organization that oversees MD-granting medical schools. 

Since at least 2015, the committee has required them to teach students to recognize and address “biases in themselves, in others, and in the health care delivery process.”

Later, it added required training in “health care disparities and health inequities.” (There’s no evidence DEI helps solve such problems.)

The result: In the 2020-21 academic year, 70% of medical schools had instituted a formal anti-racist curriculum.

By 2022, 96% of US and Canadian medical schools had incorporated DEI as a “key learning outcome.”

The Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation, which oversees the schools that train doctors of osteopathic medicine, was even more explicit. 

Its 2023 standards required these institutions to “include a commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion.” 

Each was forced to establish a DEI office, effectively embedding the ideology throughout medical education and playing an outsized role in training of physicians in this increasingly popular discipline.

These mandates distract medical students from learning actual medicine, thereby endangering the patients they will go on to treat. 

Worse, DEI’s ideological demand for a more diverse student body necessarily erodes academic standards.

Merit, not skin color, ought to decide who’s accepted into a profession that deals with life and death. 

And DEI inevitably ladders up to preferential race-based care in a dangerous and discriminatory attempt to eliminate health disparities. 

Medical education authorities even believe that matching physicians and patients by race improves health outcomes — a claim unsupported by evidence and tantamount to segregation.

None of this bodes well for patient health. 

As DEI education has gained ground in medical education, student achievement has declined. 

Nationwide, the percentage of medical students who pass the first part of the licensure exam has fallen since 2020, dropping from 97% to 89% in 2024 for MD students.

For DO students, the decline was 95% to 86% over the same timeframe.

What’s more, all the talk of systemic racism worsens the crisis of trust that already afflicts medicine. 

Black or brown patients are understandably reluctant to see a doctor if they’ve been told that racist white doctors will stack the medical deck against them.

DEI in medical education is a recipe for worse, not better, health outcomes.

So the news that both accrediting organizations have now completely eliminated their DEI mandates is worth celebrating. 

The LCME has replaced its DEI language with a new section on cultivating “self-directed learning,” including identifying “critical gaps in knowledge or understanding.” 

COCA, for its part, has simply eliminated every reference to DEI.

No medical school can now say it’s required to have a DEI office, or to embed that ideology in its curriculum.

Certainly, some medical schools may choose to continue their DEI programs and courses — but any that do are insulting the students they teach, and endangering the patients those students will soon treat. 

The practice of medicine depends on the quality of medical education — and medical schools that spend even a moment on DEI commit less time to the study of evidence, ethics and excellent care. 

But patients and doctors must stay vigilant: The decision to ditch DEI can always be reversed in the future — say, after Trump leaves office. 

That’s why his administration should encourage the rise of new accreditors, providing competition that will keep medical schools laser-focused on medicine. 

Because patients expect their doctors to be world-class healers, not activists in lab coats.

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, MD, a former associate dean for curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, is chairman at Do No Harm.