In a new article published in Theory and Society, April Bleske-Rechek of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Jukka Savolainen of Wayne State University in Detroit argue that Black students are over-represented in American medical schools in relation to their percentage of high-performing high school students in STEM disciplines.
Black Americans are underrepresented among medical school graduates compared to their share of the country’s overall population. But according to the report authors, Black Americans are strongly over-represented among medical school graduates relative to their share of the top performing high school students in Advanced Placement (AP) mathematics and science exams. These students often go on to become the most competitive applicants to medical schools.
In their analysis, the authors found that Black students represent some 14 percent of American high school students, but 5 percent of AP chemistry test takers. Asian students represent 5 percent of American high school students, but roughly 27 percent of all students who take AP chemistry. At the highest-performing level, 2 percent of Black students who take the AP chemistry exam earn the highest possible score of 5, compared to about one-fifth of Asian students who take the exam. Similar, but less pronounced, disparities were found among AP biology and AP physics students.
Based on their conclusions, the authors claim that Black Americans’ overall underrepresentation in medicine is not an issue of medical school admissions processes, but rather a result of disparities in early academic preparation.
“If the goal is genuine improvement in representation, the lesson is not to abandon standards but to address disparities at their source,” the authors write. “That means focusing on the early stages of the pipeline — family structure, literacy, math preparation, peer culture, and cognitive development — rather than engineering proportionality at the end.”
