“Today, any qualified Jewish boy who wants to be a doctor will have no trouble getting into medical school, “Dr. Morris Fishbein, well-known medical editor, said on an inspection tour here of the Mental Health Center, the nation’s first free, Jewish-sponsored, non-sectarian, nationwide mental hospital.
In an interview with the Intermountain Jewish News here, Dr. Fishbein credited the virtual elimination of medical school admission discrimination to the rise of the Jewish-sponsored Chicago Medical College and Einstein Medical College of Yeshiva University. Ten years ago, he said, there were six applicants for every place in a medical school freshman class. Today, there are two applicants for every place. Grade requirements also are lower.
If there were quotas in the past, he declared, they were geographical and not religious. State medical colleges favor entrants from their own state, he pointed out. Nevertheless, geographical quotas worked against the tremendous number of New York City Jewish applicants, he said, until New York State increased the number of its medical schools in the past decade.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
