N.Y. State Medical Schools Continue Discrimination Against Jews

Most of New York State’s nine medical schools are violating the state’s fair educational practices law by continuing their discriminatory practices in connection with the admittance of qualified Jewish students, the American Jewish Congress and the Committee for Equality in Education charged today in a letter to John P. Myers, chancellor of the state’s Board of Regents.

Also transmitted to Mr. Myers were the findings of a recently completed survey by the two organizations to back up this charge. The survey analyzes the admittance experiences of 57 of the 72 pre-medical students who were awarded in 1951 fulltuition paid state medical scholarships, good in any school in this state, on the basis of written competitive examinations.

This survey revealed that the 41 Jewish students who won state scholarships, had to file a total of 214 applications with the nine state schools in order to gain admittance, or twice as many per capita as the 16 non-Jewish winners who filed 39 applications, a ratio of 5.4 to 2.4. Thus, the samplings revealed applications of non-Jewish scholarship winners achieved a record of 76.1 percent of acceptances by New York medical schools, while those of Jewish scholarship winners achieved only 35.9 percent, although both groups ranked equally in scholarship and medical aptitudes.

A further analysis revealed that Cornell University’s medical school and the Flower Hospital’s New York Medical College were the worst offenders: the former accepted only two out of 30 Jewish state scholarship winners who applied, the latter only one out of 13. Cornell medical school also rejected the application of every Jewish scholarship winner living in New York City–21 in all. Columbia University’s record was hardly better, its College of Physicians and Surgeons having accepted three of the 19 Jewish scholarship winners surveyed.