May 18, 2025

Taylor Carty, who has cerebral palsy, long dreamt of becoming a doctor. She hoped to one day help children and young adults with disabilities.
Grace Widyatmadja for NPR

Hello!

I’m Kristin Wright, an editor here at NPR. You may also hear me reporting or anchoring the top-and-bottom of the hour Newscasts sometimes. This week, I’d like to share the story of 30-year-old Taylor Carty, who spent her 20s working toward her dream of becoming a doctor.

Carty has cerebral palsy and she wanted to help children and young adults with disabilities. So, she was ecstatic when she was accepted to Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. She got to work immediately on meeting the school’s “technical standards.”

This was completely new to me, I’d never heard of technical standards. Here’s how it works: accredited medical schools require students to pledge that they can meet certain standards – including motor skills like performing CPR or suturing a wound. According to the experts I spoke to, the standards are there to ensure that all doctors are able to perform certain tasks.

As I started looking into this more, I found a throughline: some aspiring doctors with disabilities have difficulty doing these physical procedures without some kind of modification or accommodation, like directing others to perform the task, for example.

“The one thing that made suturing more difficult was that I can’t turn [my left hand] over, palm facing up,” Carty told us. “I can get it to about neutral.” With practice, she was able to master a one-handed knot – but she was having trouble with other life-saving maneuvers like inserting a breathing tube and CPR.

After much back and forth with the school, Wayne State rescinded Carty’s acceptance.

I wondered if this meant people with certain disabilities can’t be doctors. So I looked at federal law and researched the set of requirements at the center of Carty’s rejection, asking doctors, universities, experts, lawyers and advocates to explain the requirements to me.

What I found is that there’s a push to update these technical standards so that they’re more in line with modern medicine and to increase the representation of people with disabilities in the field. Doctors I talked to say that physicians with disabilities offer valuable perspectives that help all patients, especially those who share the lived experience of having a disability. Only 3% of physicians in the U.S. report having a disability – Carty is trying to change that. After Wayne State rescinded her acceptance, she filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Justice.

I hope you’ll read more here.

— Kristin Wright, Editor, NPR

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In other news...

1. The future of student loan repayment, explained. Congressional Republicans are quietly working toward one of the most consequential overhauls in the history of the federal student loan program – one that would affect the lives of millions of borrowers. At the center of that overhaul is an effort to sunset most of the current student loan repayment plans and offer future borrowers a simple
binary: pay the same amount every month or tie your payments to your income. Read the story here.

— Cory Turner, Correspondent, NPR Ed

2. The Trump administration says it will cut another $450 million in grants to Harvard. The announcement comes a day after Harvard's president pushed back on government allegations of extreme liberalism and outlined the school's efforts to counter antisemitism on campus. Listen to the story here.

— Elissa Nadworny, Education Correspondent, NPR

3. What to know about a federal proposal to help families pay for private school. A first-of-its-kind effort to leverage federal tax dollars to help families pay for private school tuition anywhere in the U.S. is one step closer to becoming a reality. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee voted this week to include a federal school voucher program, worth $20 billion over four years, in the broader reconciliation bill that would also extend President Trump's 2017 tax cuts. Read the story here.

— Cory Turner, Correspondent, NPR Ed

Student Podcast Challenge

NPR Student Podcast Challenge entries are now due May 25!

Teachers, educators and student podcasters, it's official. We're extending the contest deadline.

We've been hearing from quite a few of you over the last few days, from all over the country, asking for a little more time to get those podcasts in. And we know how busy everyone is — wrapping up assignments, preparing for exams, while still trying to have your best shot at winning the Student Podcast Challenge. All entries are now due Sunday, May 25, at midnight E.T.

Submit yours here

And here's something to make you smile...

This week we were captivated by the all-female free divers of Jeju Island who have a 'superpower' in their genes

The women of Jeju island – 50 or 60 miles off the coast of South Korea – start diving as girls and continue well into old age, across all of life's milestones. They dive to collect seafood to eat and sell. "Things like abalone, sea urchins … seaweeds sometimes," says Melissa Ilardo, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Utah. The Haenyeo routinely dive in waters that she says are 50 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface, at best.

Ilardo wanted to know how the Haenyeo are capable of enduring such an extreme lifestyle, she says: "How evolution might have shaped the Haenyeo to be better divers, to dive more safely, to dive for longer."

In a study published in Cell Reports, Ilardo and her colleagues reveal the adaptations that make the Haenyeo's superpower possible. It's a mix of physiological and genetic changes, some of which appear to have had an impact on the entire population of Jeju Island.

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