Is UCLA a “failed medical school”?

There's a very peculiar article making the rounds from the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site. The gist of the piece is that ever since 2020, when Jennifer Lucero took over as dean of admissions for the UCLA Medical School, diversity has ruled the day and standards have plummeted:

Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a "failed medical school," said one former member of the admissions staff. "We want racial diversity so badly, we're willing to cut corners to get it."

....In some of the cohorts [Lucero] admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics.... That uptick coincided with a steep drop in the number of Asian matriculants and tracks the subjective impressions of faculty who say that students have never been more poorly prepared.

.... "UCLA still produces some very good graduates," one professor said. "But a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified."

Needless to say, I know nothing about UCLA and nothing about medical school. But I can read. First off, here's a chart from the article itself showing admission demographics at UCLA med school:

Sorry about the fuzziness. But the bottom line is pretty clear: between 2019 and 2022, the number of non-white and non-Asian students increased by 30. Even in the worst case, if every single one of these students was woefully unqualified, that's about 17% of the class. How do you get from there to "a third to a half"?

Then there's this:

The average MCAT score of UCLA's incoming classes has gone up. Average GPA has also gone up, as has selectivity. Those are very strange stats for a bunch of kids who are supposedly barely functional.

And there's this about the admissions process:

Race is rarely mentioned outright, and unlike the committee for anesthesiology residents, the committee for students does not see the race or ethnicity of applicants.

If the admissions committee doesn't see the race of applicants, how can Lucero and her allies be badgering everyone into admitting fewer Asians and more Hispanics?

Nothing about this adds up. As it happens, though, the article also notes something else: UCLA recently changed its curriculum so that students start doing clinical rounds in their second year, instead of their third. It's certainly possible—inevitable, even—that this would lead to students being considerably less prepared for rounds. And it might be responsible for lower grades on the "shelf exams" that follow rotations. Who knows? Maybe this new curriculum is a failure. But even if it is, it has nothing to do with race.

The article itself is entirely blind: not a single critic of the school is named. Nor is there any acknowledgement of rising admission standards. There's just a complaint that one of the first year classes is "Structural Racism and Health Equity." I'd take this piece with a very large grain of salt.