HMS Amends Admit Policy

In a move that brings its admissions policies in line with the rest of the University, Harvard Medical School (HMS) will eliminate an admissions subcommittee dedicated to applicants from “under-represented minorities” next year, according to HMS administrators.

The announcement comes a week after HMS sent out admissions decisions to its incoming Class of 2010, and almost three years after the Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan’s point-based undergraduate admissions policy in the cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.

HMS officials acknowledged that the policy shift came in response to fears that their system could be viewed as unconstitutional.

“It’s well-intentioned, but we’ve been told repeatedly by the University counsel and consultants for the University counsel that it is not a wise policy to maintain,” said Dr. Robert J. Mayer, faculty associate dean for admissions at HMS, yesterday.

Since the landmark 1978 Bakke Supreme Court decision that barred universities from using quota systems, HMS has used a two-tiered system in which applications from under-represented minorities—defined as African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans—are evaluated by a dedicated subcommittee before being pooled with the rest of the applicants for a final decision, according to Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, HMS associate dean for student affairs.

According to Mayer, HMS started to review its affirmative action policy in late 2004.

Under the new system, minority applications will simply be flagged to ensure that at least one minority admissions officer evaluates the application and interviews the applicant, Poussaint said in an interview last Friday.

“We stood out, in a sense, as a contrast to Harvard College, the Law School, the Business School, and all the other medical schools in the country,” Mayer said. “It’s an internal adjustment in the way that the process takes place, so as not to make the Medical School and the University in general vulnerable to any outside forces.”

Poussaint cited the language of the Gratz v. Bollinger decision, which called for “holistic” affirmative action policies, saying that administrators “thought it would look more holistic if minority groups were spread over all the subcommittees.”

“They didn’t want to give any appearance of doing something different that was in some way limited to minorities,” Poussaint said.

Mayer added that the change in the admissions process did not indicate a reduced commitment to diversity.

“There is absolutely no change in our commitment to diversity,” Mayer said. “If anything, it enhances the commitment to under-represented minorities.”

In his interview with The Crimson yesterday, Mayer also released statistics on the incoming Class of 2010, the last HMS class to be admitted under the old affirmative action policy.

According to Mayer, the acceptance rate at HMS remained steady this year at 4.2 percent. The school remains at the top of many students’ wish lists: Mayer said that the school’s haul of 4,683 applications meant that one of every seven medical school applicants in the country applied to Harvard. Minority applications were down slightly, but both Mayer and Poussaint said that the drop was well within standard deviations.

—Staff writer Laurence H. M. Holland can be reached at lholland@fas.harvard.edu.