Med School Quietly Scrubs Race-Based Criteria For Gov’t Funded Program Following Complaint

A prominent medical school silently removed a race requirement from a National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded research program on its website following an October 2022 civil rights complaint alleging the admission criteria was illegal and discriminatory.

The Ohio State University College of Medicine Postbaccalaureate Research 🎓Education Program (PREP), which is designed to equip pre-medical students with additional research experience to bolster their medical school applications, originally stated that applicants must be “Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander” in order to qualify for NIH funding through the program but silently removed the requirement sometime in late 2023 after Do No Harm’s complaint was filed. The program’s website now replaces the requirement with one stating applicants must “have encountered obstacles to gaining sufficient experience and the skills necessary for admission into a research-centric PhD graduate program in their chosen field of study.”

Do No Harm, an organization that works to keep politics out of medical 🎓Education, research and clinical practice, alleged that criteria is “unlawful racial discrimination in violation of Title VI” of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race.

“Ohio State and NIH changed their eligibility requirements sometime last year to remove all race-based criteria while our complaint was being evaluated, either in response to legal challenges like ours or to avoid legal challenges in the future,” Mark J. Perry, senior fellow at Do No Harm, said in a