The views of this article solely represent those of the authors, not necessarily their institution. Brian Zhang and Tumi Akeke are first-year medical students, and Akeke is president of the Stanford Student National Medical Association.
The Department of Justice’s recent investigation into Stanford Medicine’s admissions practices might lead some to assume the school enrolls an unusually high share of underrepresented minority students. That assumption would be false.
The proportion of matriculating Black medical students at Stanford was 22%, or 20 out of a class size of 90, in 2020. Five years later, for our matriculating class, the administration does not ask for race or ethnicity information and cannot confirm the demographic data of students. However, informal estimates have placed the number at approximately seven Black medical students (7.8%) and no Black physician assistant (PA) students. This change from previous years is difficult to ignore and suggests a notable decline in Black student representation. Alongside second-year medical student Katya Vera, chair of the Stanford Latino Medical Students’ Association, we also recently issued a correction to an LA Times article that misstated the national share of Latino medical students as 7% and incorrectly implied that Stanford Medicine enrolls a higher percentage.
In merely suggesting that Stanford is preferencing certain racial groups and should reverse course, the DOJ leans on a deeply cynical and prejudiced notion that Black and Brown success is itself evidence that merit has been compromised somewhere. As medical students of color — Asian American and Black — we have seen how these debates shape who is welcomed into medicine versus whose presence is treated with suspicion. In a country marred by historical and systemic racism, any conception of merit that ignores the conditions shaping opportunity, access and potential, including race, is dishonest. The DOJ and the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) may disagree, but ignoring racial inequities does not erase the relevance of race in health and education.
The DOJ’s investigation into Stanford Medicine also seems to entirely miss the purpose of medical school. If medicine is a vocation of care ordered toward the needs and health outcomes of others, admissions cannot be reduced to the identification of applicants who satisfy narrow empirical metrics of merit. Our patients have the ultimate right to define merit, and an effective admissions committee acts as their proxy advocate, with the goal of building a physician workforce capable of serving the full reality of the diverse patients whose lives will depend on it. Our class at Stanford consists of veterans, firefighters, scientists, professors, small business owners, parents, children of surgeons and children of cashiers. We speak dozens of languages, serve California communities through free clinics and city partnerships and pursue innovations that expand the possibilities of healthcare. Our differences matter not only in how we learn, but in how we care for others.
In about 10 years, we will be attending physicians with our own teams. However, each of our perspectives are limited. We will inevitably treat patients whose relationships to medicine differ profoundly from our own. In those moments, we will depend not only on our training, but on colleagues whose experiences allow them to see what we might miss, ask questions we might not think to ask and build trust in ways we cannot. The strength of a team lies not in sameness, but in the ability to collectively meet patients where they are.
Even now, as medical students, some of the most important parts of our education happen in conversation with peers. Over lunch or between classes, we have learned about Tuskegee, where the U.S. Public Health Service studied untreated syphilis in Black men and withheld treatment even after penicillin became available; about the “Mississippi appendectomies” that saw the forced sterilization of Black women; and about the nuclear tests conducted on the Marshall Islands, causing devastating illness, birth defects and displacement in Indigenous communities.
Physicians who understand that history and who share in its legacy are better equipped to earn trust, record fuller histories and catch the small but critical details on which complex diagnoses so often depend. In some cases of racial and cultural concordance, patients have better life expectancies and health outcomes. Beyond medicine, research has shown that diverse teams drive employee creativity and innovation. Women and racial minorities introduce scientific novelty at higher rates across disciplines, despite being recognized less.
Even under the new legal framework of a post affirmative-action America, the case for investigating Stanford Medicine still fails. Consider economic inequality, not as a replacement for race, but as one example of the many overlapping barriers that shape access to education. More than three-fourths of medical students hail from families in the top two quintiles of family income. Given Trump’s inroads among voters with lower incomes and without college degrees in 2024, and his continued championing of the American worker and their families, one might expect his administration to prioritize reducing financial barriers to professional education, a growing driver of social mobility.
Yet by that measure, Stanford is also a curious target. Through scholarships such as Knight-Hennessy and emergency aid, financial aid and loan programs for graduate students, Stanford has not merely echoed the DOJ’s stated goal of “restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” it has done more than most institutions to advance it. By confronting economic barriers that keep talented students out of medicine, Stanford has enabled qualified students, including those whose families live well below the federal poverty line, to thrive, while Trump’s policies have actively worked to increase caps on GradPlus loans and slash college access pipeline programs. Among Stanford Medicine students, 85.9% of the MD class of 2023 and 76.8% of the MD class of 2024 received financial assistance. MD graduates also leave with substantially less debt than the national average: $122,830 in 2023 and $156,377 in 2024, compared with national averages of $186,765 and $190,759.
Of course, Stanford is not beyond criticism. Institutions of real consequence owe people they serve not perfection, but a willingness to inaugurate new possibilities. We encourage Stanford to build on its efforts by increasing the number of MD and PA students receiving substantial or full aid to align with prior years. We want to see a PA Knight-Hennessy scholar. At the same time, any meaningful discussion of socioeconomic access must acknowledge its intersection with race. We want to see Stanford enroll more Black, Latino and Indigenous medical and PA students, not for optics, but because they deserve to be here without having their success dismissed as the product of DEI. Medicine itself is impoverished when patients of color remain unseen and unheard by the institutions meant to care for them. Amid this investigation, we trust that the Stanford community will protect and stand in solidarity with, not shy away from, its underrepresented members.
We are at Stanford because we deeply believe in this institution, in its values and in its power to transform the bounds and access of medicine. We believe we have what it takes to help Stanford advance its mission. Groundless DOJ investigations do not move that work forward. They distract from our goals and make them harder to achieve by redirecting attention to addressing unfounded legal claims. If the DOJ seeks to expand opportunity to those who deserve it most, it should abandon this political theater and stand behind a vision of healthcare service for all Americans.