As medical students graduate this spring, American medical schools are celebrating the achievements of the nation’s newest doctors. They are also celebrating something else: an increase in the number of students from underrepresented populations.
From 2017 to 2018, the number of black students enrolled in U.S. medical schools rose by 4.6%, while the number of medical students identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native increased by 6.3%, according to data released by the Association of American Medical Colleges. It’s the latest evidence of a steady increase in the enrollment of nonwhite students over the past several years.
The numbers are encouraging, but only a start, educators say.
“It’s good that the hard numbers are up,” said Dr. Mark Henderson, associate dean of admissions at the University of California, Davis. “But there are real gaps between who our residents are and the communities they serve.”
The increases are also no accident.
In the seven years leading up to 2009, the number of black medical students in the U.S. had been decreasing annually. In 2009, however, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) toughened diversity requirements for accreditation. Specifically, the group went beyond its previous suggestion that medical schools “should have policies and practices ensuring the gender, racial, cultural, and economic diversity of its students.”
Citing Supreme Court decisions among its reasons, the LCME now insists that schools “must” have policies and practices in place that achieve what it calls “appropriate diversity among its students….”
It worked, according to a December study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. After 2009, the overall trend of declining enrollment of nonwhite students reversed.
In some cases, schools that have failed to take heed of the new criteria have been forced to pay attention. In 2016, amid complaints of racism and student protests that led to high-level resignations, the LCME deemed the University of Missouri-Columbia medical school “noncompliant” in meeting diversity requirements.
With its accreditation at stake, the school began aggressively recruiting students of color and addressing long-standing problems affecting them. By 2018, the number of black students enrolled there more than doubled, from 12 to 25, while the number of Latino students increased from two to 10, according to AAMC data.
Medical schools have responded to the standards by dedicating space and funding to the task, and appointing individuals to help direct their diversity efforts. Ten years in, they are learning a lot.
From within, and from the top down
Dr. Joan Reede, a pediatrician and Harvard’s dean for diversity and community partnership, emphasized that institutions must go beyond superficial changes, describing a process that is less like plastic surgery and more like gene editing.
“Sure, you can make a pretty picture by adding different-colored faces,” she said. “But the goal of improving representation has to be added to a school’s DNA — has to be embedded in the organizational infrastructure.”
To that end, Reede led a task force that helped develop Harvard’s diversity statement, which it unveiled during a 2017 public forum. AAMC data shows that Harvard’s enrollment of black medical students rose almost 5.3% from 2017 to 2018, while its Latino enrollment has nearly doubled since 2009.
Whether issued as a standalone policy or added to a school’s guiding principles, a written diversity statement, presented publicly, doesn’t just formalize the school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. It also signals that it’s a priority, explained Dr. Leon McDougle, chief diversity officer at Ohio State University.
“When you say out loud that inclusiveness is a value within the strategic plan of your institution, the faculty will follow, or at least stay out of the way.”
At Ohio State, the number of black medical students rose from 52 in 2009 to 95 in 2018. The number of Latino students rose from 18 to 48.
Dr. Keisha Gibson, who has been promoting diversity and inclusion as both a student and faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, cautioned that administrators and faculty members tend to respond in three different ways.
“We have people that are activated to help change things because they recognize the issues. Then there are some that recognize the issues but aren’t activated by it. And then there are the ones who just don’t get it,” she said.
“Sure, you can make a pretty picture by adding different-colored faces. But the goal of improving representation has to be added to a school’s DNA — has to be embedded in the organizational infrastructure.”
Dr. Joan Reede, Harvard’s dean for diversity and community partnership
It’s important, she added, for an institution’s leadership to fall firmly into the first category. “When mandates come from the top, that’s when the culture changes,” Gibson said.
Cultural change is what will help schools retain students from underrepresented backgrounds, said McDougle. “You can recruit all you want,” he said. “But if they don’t feel welcome, they won’t stay.”
It’s not just about the students
Medical schools have historically failed to diversify their faculty. With this in mind, the LCME has called for schools to diversify staffing as well.
“In the U.S., racial numbers among medical faculty are even worse than [for] the students,”said Henderson, the associate dean at UC Davis, which launched its Center for a Diverse Healthcare Workforce in 2016. “It’s mostly white men, so you don’t have mentors to support students who might feel like impostors just being here.”
Henderson recommends putting department heads in charge of faculty recruitment efforts.
“Incentivize deans to value faculty diversity,” he said. “Designate resources, offer funding, dedicate recruitment packages.
“Physicians are intensely competitive,” he added. “And if they know we’re measuring the percentage of the underrepresented, and their department is showing low numbers, they’re motivated.”
But when it comes to recruiting and supporting students of color, a diverse faculty must provide more than visible role models, said Reede, who founded a minority faculty development program for Harvard in 1990.
“I’m not just interested in who gets a seat at the table, but whose voice is heard once they’re sitting there, and how much their voices influence policy,” Reede said.
Meaningful measures
Making diversity part of accreditation criteria has effectively changed the definition of what makes an institution viable. Similarly, school leaders are rethinking what makes a medical student successful.
Some schools are reevaluating their entry and matriculation requirements, including test scores. They are also taking into account non-academic factors such as socioeconomic status.
Henderson said this is where he often finds the most resistance to diversity initiatives.
“The pushback comes when our average [test score] is lower,” he explained. “Someone in leadership came to me and said, ‘We’re bringing the wrong people into this medical school.’ There’s a lot of entrenched bias, and it can get very antagonistic. But a score on a test does not make a physician,” he added.
McDougle agreed. “They’ll start talking about scores, which have nothing to do with clinical care,” he said. “A high MCAT score does not correlate with high performance in medical school.”
He recalled helping a faculty member understand why it’s important to get away from narrow, often race-based notions about prospects for success.
“This one physician decided to require that residents in his subspecialty program had to come from a top pre-med and have at least five publications,” he said. “I asked him if he had done all that way back when. Then I got, ‘Well, I was from a small town, and my family wasn’t well off,’ and all that. I said, ‘But you got into your specialty, didn’t you?’”
All medical students, but especially those from underrepresented communities, can now expect more help. Today, schools may assign them coaches to help with writing essays and developing portfolios; training in test taking, time management, and other academic survival skills; counseling to help detect and manage learning disabilities and cope with social isolation and academic pressure.
“Of course we’re looking at our pipeline to make sure we get people who can handle the rigors of medical school,” added Gibson. “But we also have to make sure we are setting them up for success.”
Play the long game
Not all news is encouraging when it comes to diversity.
In February, the New England Journal of Medicine examined medical school enrollment data over a 20-year period, 1997 through 2017. While the authors noted a 30% increase in residents from “racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in medicine,” they also found that the proportion of such students had dropped from 15% to 13%.
The authors pointed particularly to the “growing gap between the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic makeup of medical school classes and that of the general population.”
Nationally, Latinos make up 17% of the U.S. population but only 4% of physicians. There’s a similar disparity for African Americans, who also make up 4% of the nation’s doctors but 14% of the population.
“Ultimately, that’s the problem we’re trying to solve,” added Henderson, a co-author of the NEJM perspective. “But this is the long game.”
Some schools saw steady increases over the past several years, according to the data from the AAMC. In others, numbers often stagnated or even dropped in the intervening years between 2009 and 2018. This happened with black students at Harvard and UC Davis.
“That’s how health interventions work,” McDougle said. “You don’t tell a patient to lose weight, or to stop smoking and they become healthy right away,” he said. “There’s some up and down.
“A public health campaign to reduce obesity or eliminate a contagious disease takes time to show improvement,” he added. “You have to stick to it to see long-term results.”
This thread has become a joke. Diversity? Why? Ask yourself, do you want a diverse crew in teh cockpit of your next flight? Asians, do you feel safer with an asian pilot? Whites, do you want a ‘white guy’? Where are all of the black pilots? Yet black people fly EVERY DAY! This thread is about the fallacy of acceptance into medical school, yet everyone’s personal preference comes out. Some may call it prejudices. Funny, when its you, or your mother, you want THE BEST. Yet when you want to comment on a thread, you want diversity. What a bunch of hypocrites! I am guessing next time those seeking diversity gets on a plane, they will peek into the cockpit upon entry. If the system isn’t based upon meritocracy, then we all should be arguing that it should. Those same fools who want diversity are the same who push for quality. You cannot put lipstick on a pig, and you cannot make an unqualified person smarter just because it makes you feel good. The system, like many today influenced by political views and prejudices, is broken. We need to get back to basics, requiring the system of selecting future docs to select the best of the best, no trophy for trying, no MD because we ‘need to check a box’. There is no room in quality care when the pool is full of unqualified applicants.
Emotions run high on both sides. Your comments certainly are justified in a free and open society. Freedom of speech is a stalwart principle in America. However, things get taken out of proportion and context.
May I ask do the current metrics that one considers to be a superior qualified applicant correlate with that person being a excellent physician? The answer is no, because these metrics have noting to do with work ethics, being able to apply their intellectual skills with practical bed side medicine. So to cry out that high MCAT scores and having a 4.0 GPA is the standard for insuring that America will have excellent physician is a fallacy. Why do I say this, it is because I train physician in the art of cancer surgery. I will tell you most of my high scoring physicians are just average at best in their skills as a practitioner. They have the ability to give me all of the book knowledge, but when a patient is in real trouble clinically they typically are the worse in managing problems. Having said that, this does not mean that they should not be accepted into medical school, but do not conflate high scores with being a great physician.
Now as it relates to diversity, you again can have your opinions on this matter. However, I will tell you that often my white colleagues come to me for help with very difficult patients that are black, because they lack the ability to connect with the patient, because they do not have their life experiences. There is mutual distrust that is a problem ( we all remember the Tuskegee syphilis study and all of the recent studies of minorities getting worse care in major academic institutions). So differences in life experiences are real and diversity will help this issue. I have been able to diffuse many tense issue in our facility, because we have fostered a environment of mutual respect. Medicine is not like flying an airplane. That analogy is flawed. Medicine requires two people to connect in order to solve a problem. You just don’t simply walk in and walk out with your problem solved like you would do on an airplane.
On a personal note, I am a product of affirmative action. I am black and I had no chance of getting into Medical school in the south years ago without this policy. Yes my MCAT scores were lower ( I was educated in inferior Alabama public schools ) and my GPA was only 3.4. However, what these metrics did not measure is my desired to be the best. I out worked and out published all of my white fellow students and residents. Admission score do not measure the heart of a person, only people interacting with people can measure this. 30 years later I am a board certified cancer surgeon, a full professor in my specialty, contributing member of society ( I donate to charities, work with the less fortunate in communities that are underserved that not white doctors have ever been ), I teach all races of residents equally, and I have hired many poor white women to work in my office. Now I would say that based on my success that making a decision based on raced improved America. If we all begin to do our part and stop having so much vitriol against one another we could move this country forward. We all intellectually know that African Americas are under represented in the ranks of physicians; and we know that African Americans also have the highest mortalities and morbidities of most disease processes. So it is imperative that the medical community address this issue.
Lastly it is true that some of the accepted applicants that are accepted related to diversity standards may not make it through medical school. But those that do tend to be some of the best physician in America. Additionally, not every white applicant that is accepted make it through medical school. I know several that punch out. So people are people and we need to stop ignoring where we have major deficits in our medical system and try our best to improve this for the greater good of all members of society.
Hi to all! First of all please excuse my grammar. I have read all your conversations. If I’m out of topic right now I still want your point of view. My daughter graduated MCB from UC Berkeley with honors. Actually .5 % more she will be a Magna Cum Laude. AS I heard yesterday Asians will have a hard time to enter med schools this year due to the most race students and Asians has the most doctors in US than whites(I’m not a racist), my relatives are whites too. It is true, my daughter got rejected from most of the schools she applied and the waitlisted school turned into rejected too. She is not alone into this problem, there are more people that we know of. It was disappointing that she was really determine to be a cardiologist.
It’s essential to honestly report on the impact of affirmative action on healthcare quality. I favor affirmative action because there is substantial evidence that patients prefer race concordance. While this is a legitimate motive for certain groups, it’s considered racist when exhibited by the majority group. And yet, we refuse to provide the majority group with firm assurances of the equality of outcomes. Meaning their choice for race concordance could well be based upon quality considerations and not racism. We are doing no one any favors by withholding honest research on affirmative action outcomes.
This article makes me cringe….I invite readers to google Patrick Chaviz – the affirmative action candidate who took the seat of Bakke at UC Davis. Everyone congratulated themselves over their enlightened attitude.Twenty years later Dr. Chaviz wound up losing his license after negligently killing several of his patients.
I am very sorry to see students with disabilities are not included in the push for a more diverse medical class. Between being accepted to medical school in 1980 and beginning medical school a few months later, I became disabled by surgical malpractice. You will notice there is no MD after my name. My medical school failed to make accomidations for me to complete my degree. I did complete 3 years of medical school including honors in 5 subjects. My goal was to become a pathologist, a specialty that fit my personality and gifts as well as being a disabled friendly specialty. The ADA was passed 3 years after I finally left. Please make more slots available for persons with a disability. We make medicine better because we have learned how to think outside the box every day.
I don’t know how old you are, but gp back for it. Or become a N.P. as they can practice independently in half the states. Charles Krautheimer, M.D. (tyr now deceased regular Fox News contributor) was able to complete medical school as a quadriplegic after a swimming pool dive gone bad. The UT (Univ of TX) system med school in Galveston had a paraplegic student who was totally wheelchair bound, in the early 90’s. So there are medical schools which were open to physically handicapped persons for the last 40 years. It is terrible that yours was not. When one door closes, search our the ones that can be opened, which you name suffixes attest to you doing.
I am too old and my body is worn out to go back. It is funny that you suggest the UT System as a good choice. I was in a UT System Medical School. I suspect they would have been more open to making accommodations, if I were a male from Texas but I was a female who was from out of state.
Thats not fair, even you are on your disability you still can contribute to the society. We all needs you being a pathologist! You can be a better doctor than anyone else.
What was the USMLE failure rate is for URMs in these last few years? It was very high in years leading up to the increase (approx 50%). If it has changed up or down, that is a key metric in judging success and needs to be published as part of a patient’s right to know and as a public health requirement.
@Clarence. This seems like a good idea in theory, however, the picture is a bit more complicated, and this idea would sort of lead to “spinning your wheels”. People can’t become MD’s if they don’t pass all of the 4 usmle exams, and you cannot graduate from medical school without passing 3 of the 4. In addition these exams will be pass/ fail in the future… so for those reasons looking at the failure rate would not be helpful because anyone with a medical license will have passed those exam, which would also make disclosing that information irrelevant.
Also… I would be careful when looking at the study i think you maybe referring to because the purpose of that study was to evaluate students with academic issues ability to eventually pass usmle and become MD’s, it does not include the vast majority of students, (usmle 1 first time pass rate is these days is close to90%); as evidenced by the study taking 7 years and only ending up with just under 7k subjects.
Everyone keeps saying “I want the best physician (implied: regardless of race, gender, etc.)…” There’s PLENTY of qualified doctors out there who have patients outright REFUSE care because of those reasons, so give me a break.
I need more black women doctors so when I go into an ER bent over in pain complaining about abdominal pain radiating into my back, they know I’m not exaggerating and need to have a thorough examination. I was sent home with a prescription for vicodin after having a white female physician give me the once over in the ER. A morphine drip didn’t knock me out. If I didn’t work for a prominent surgeon with connections at the time, I would’ve DIED from a ruptured appendix! Iknow a woman who died a day after giving birth because when she complained about leg pain (after a GD caesarean!), nobody took her seriously, smh. Even I learned how easy it is to clot after surgery, so pain in extremities probably means a clot. There’s study-upon-study showing the medical field (which is very white and male) doesn’t take it seriously when black people say they’re in pain. There are people, EVEN PHYSICIANS, who believe black people have a higher pain tolerance (just because they’re black, smfh). So you don’t HAVE to like these school’s diversity initiatives! But they are ABSOLUTELY necessary. Glad to say I now have an Asian-American internist and she understands all of this and is a great listener and I wish all doctors were like her.
It’s sad to see how prejudice is propagated by patients. I hate to tell you, but ER docs and others, do doubt ANY pain commplaints coming from ANY people of lower socioeconomic class. It doesn’t matter if the patient is Hispanic, black or “white trash.” Those groups will be suspected as fishing for opioids.
Sadly too, women’s complaints tend to be dismissed a bit as they tend to cry and become more emotional in response to pain.
I have know female physicians, like myself, who had complaints brushed off. When I made it clear that I didn’t want pills, but was concerned that I needed imaging & possibly surgery, my problem was addressed.
Even though I’m only, “white,” I can actually and do treat patients of all races. My best friend from medical is black. She is against affirmative action in Medical School placement as am I.
People deserve the best doctor…period.
Thats not fair, even you are on your disability you still can contribute to the society. We all needs you being a pathologist! You can be a better doctor than anyone else.
How about we look from the patient perspective? Do we select our physician based upon “diversity”? Do list our personal physicians based upon color, or nationality? I cannot recall any patient telling me that their family doc is a woman, their anesthesiologist was Asian, their orthopedist was Indian — look at me how grand I am having such a diverse medical team! I hear things such as “what medical school did he/she attend?, I cannot say my doctor’s first or last name, and I cannot understand a word my physician says. THESE are the key elements in a patient-physician relationship. Diversity = watering down. We all know, albeit few are willing to accept it. Imagine sports teams drafting players based upon color, religion, sexual preference? I dont think I will ever hear “With the 2nd pick of the 2020 NBA Draft, the New York Knicks select Moisha Keppelsburg, 5’3″ female, gay, socially conservative/fiscally liberal from Yeshiva University”. As ridiculous as this sounds, this is exactly how we are selecting the new physicians into the profession, basing it upon quotas and subjective data. Let the attorneys begin to develop databases of unfair selection acts against all medical schools, bankrupting their cherished coffers in defense of the very thing they are claiming they are fighting.
I engaged in this discussion in hopes of exchanging ideas and in hopes of allowing people to see new/think about different perspectives. It seems most have viewed this as some sort of debate club where they move on to different things when the falicy of their ideas has been unmasked. @Vincenzo you have the false belief that this system is a meritocracy, i had the same delusion when i was younger. There are several examples that prove it is not and never has been a meritocracy, i could provide several references but quite frankly, im not being paid to be your teacher & judging from your comments you are not interested in pondering any other ideas. To name a few, Asians have been shown to score higher than any other demographic, despite this they are underrepresented in all specialties, especially the most competitive ones, in addition, med school & residency applicants submit a picture with their application, AAMC has stated programs should use government id to identify applicants on the day of interview, but have not mandated it. I was in a residency selection meeting in which an applicant choose not to submit a picture… i was the only person who fought to give this person a fair review, which in hind sight he didn’t get anyway. When I inquired as to why the pic was so important people made code comments like “its just weird” or “everyone else has one”. Couple this with a recent study showing that” appearence” was a better predictor of residency selection than academic performance. I will end by telling you in all honesty you don’t want it to be a meritocracy, because all the doctors would be asian, and im sure the majority community would love/ stand for that. Im sure they would think that’s the best way to “ make America great”
@DMD who made the below comment.
“I will end by telling you in all honesty you don’t want it to be a meritocracy, because all the doctors would be asian, and im sure the majority community would love/ stand for that.”
What? Who cares if they are all Asian? Who cares? We want the most qualified people giving us medical care.
I have lived in China for the past 10 years and every single doctor there is Asian. They could care less about this “diversity” garbage. My advice, move there so you can avoid this poisonous American D&I ideology.
@ Anthony Well why aren’t they all asian? They clearly the most qualified. And according to you race isn’t a factor in admission currently
What? Vincenzo’s comment doesn’t imply that racial discrimination doesn’t exist; it supposes that it DOES. He objects to it. And the discrimination comes from people plugging for affirmative action.
I cannot believe that you actually admitted you would have a problem with the Asian minority dominating a field.
Judging “diversity” by skin color? Absolute garbage, and everyone knows it. We want the most qualified people providing medical care. Period.
Guess what? The vast majority believe this is absolute garbage no matter how much you try to promote this despicable ideology.
I suppose you also ball up half the world and call them “Asians” and see nothing wrong with that incredibly ignorant classification error?
“Judging “diversity” by skin color? Absolute garbage, and everyone knows it. We want the most qualified people providing medical care. Period.”
This not always true. Half the time my patients can’t even communicate properly or comfortably with their doctor, or their doctor doesn’t understand half their diet when they communicate it with them.
These patients want doctors who can relate to and really empathize with their way of living, not just someone who is gonna write them a prescription and send them on their way home. When patients are unable to really connect with their health care provider or our healthcare system their health ends up suffering.
@ Anthony you need to educate yourself sir… asian/pacific islander is the classification used by the US govt!! Is this an admission the US govt is “incredibly ignorant” as i’ve been stating? At least the govt tries to correct its ignorance…. not yet sure i can say the same of you sir.