Sorry, it was my attempt at a joke in humor (clearly it didn’t work at all and completely bombed). I will say this, if anyone takes that seriously, that student organization will be getting the most member participation ever this upcoming fall if all Year 1 students were to join, much less everyone in all 6 years, if 600 people join. lol.
Let me explain (this time not joking):
It’s more by just applicant demographics, that UMKC’s BA/MD program has a high percentage of Asians, specifically Asians of Indian (Indian subcontinent) descent: http://kcur.org/post/med-school-express - “Asian students make up almost 40 percent of the student population at UMKC’s medical school. That’s close to twice the national average at other medical schools.” And this article was back in 2006. Remember, this is a program which occurs BEFORE the traditional application process even starts – the process that most people who go to college usually know something about. And you have to know about these programs a little bit earlier in high school to have some sort of fighting chance to build a CV to make yourself competitive, thus making the applicant pool for BA/MD programs much different than the traditional applicant pool (although it’s much easier to do that research now with so many websites like College Confidential).
Now at UMKC Med it’s probably greater than 40% (maybe 50-60%?) just because you now have more total # of Asians who are of college-eligible status/age (and thus more Asians applying to Bachelor/MD programs) and also you have the added regional pool (since Fall 2007) which we get a LOT of our regional students coming from certain states: Illinois, Oklahoma and Kansas (before that, at UMKC, it was only in-state and out-of-state, usually at a ratio of 90% in-state:10% out-of state). Arkansas and Nebraska are probably like the lowest, in terms of overall composition of regional students.
So being Asian (or Asian-Indian), isn’t something the school purposefully tries to recruit more of (so not a preference by definition), it’s more just a consequence of the demographics of the Bachelor/MD application pool itself.
Just as a comparison, the percentage of Asians in the entire university at UMKC, is about 7%: https://irapweb.umkc.edu/reports/files/pdf/Student%20Profile%202010-2011.pdf