Diversity and Inclusion in Medicine

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Resources for Underrepresented Applicants


Updated: 1/29/22

Underrepresented minorities surge not only in the applicant pool but in the total number of matriculated students for the class of 2025 who began med school in the summer of 2021. A total of 62,443 students applied to medical school in the summer of 2020 with plans to matriculate in August of 2021. That’s an increase of 17.8% or 9,413 applicants. Read the highlights from this AAMC article Medical School Applicants and Enrollments Hit Record Highs; Underrepresented Minorities Lead the Surge. You can also review the data yourself at the following: 2021 Fall Applicant, Matriculant, and Enrollment Data Tables.

Highlights:

  • Total applicants for 2021-22: 62,443 as compared to last highest number of 53,370 in 2019-20. That’s an increase of 9,413 students in one year.

  • Also notable is the 21.1% increase in first time medical school applicants. Normally first time applicants increase between 2-3% each year.

  • Applicants who self identified as Black or African American rose by 21% in the 2020-21 application cycle.

  • The total number of matriculated students who self identified as Black or African American went from 9.5% in 2020 to 11.3% in 2021.

  • Applicants who self identified as Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin rose by 7.1% in the 2020-21 application cycle.

  • The total number of matriculated students who self identified as Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin went from 12.0% in 2020 to 12.7% in 2021.

  • Women represented 56.8% of applicants and 55.5% of matriculants.


The senseless killing of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020 threw the US into a state of mourning not only for his life but for the countless lives taken as a result of police brutality and the effects of systemic racism in the US. This AAMC article published on June 1, 2020 written by David J. Skorton, MD, President and CEO of the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) and David A. Acosta, MD, AAMC Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for the AAMC address our collective concerns and call to action: AAMC Statement on Police Brutality and Racism in America and Their Impact on Health

“Our country must unite to combat and dismantle racism and discrimination in all its forms and denounce race-related violence, including police brutality. Enough is enough. As healers and educators of the next generation of physicians and scientists, the people of America’s medical schools and teaching hospitals bear the responsibility to ameliorate factors that negatively affect the health of our patients and communities: poverty, education, access to transportation, healthy food, and health care.”

Now more than ever, the medical community needs to diversify their workforce to mirror our varied patient population in the United States. We need to recognize the barriers that many students face in their path to becoming a doctor and create ways to help students overcome barriers and succeed. The path to become a doctor can take 12+ years so actions we take today may not be realized until 2032. At this juncture, we need to prioritize supporting the next generation of African American male physicians. The documentary Black Men in White Coats outlines significant barriers preventing black men from becoming doctors and why it is so very important as a society to have a physician workforce that represents the people it serves.

Although over the past 10 years, there have been some significant gains in diversifying the medical workforce, there is still much work to be done. Women do outnumber men in medical school today, but we still need to do more to support Hispanic, African American and Native American men and women to pursue a career in medicine. According to the AAMC Table B-3 that summarizes the total medical school enrollment by racial and ethnic characteristics (alone), only 2% of American doctors are black men, only 4% of medical residents are black (2.9% female/1.5%male) and 7% of the American medical school population is black.

All medical schools have wholeheartedly embraced diversity and inclusion as key components to help diversify their medical school communities. They have instituted institution-wide assessments and strategic planning. Many are recruiting more diverse faculty and creating “pipeline programs to increase the number of qualified applicants representing diverse backgrounds,” as explained by the AAMC in their 2019 Fostering Diversity and Inclusion document. The report points out that even with the significant efforts by the medical school community to create programs and policies to address this concern, “the numbers of Black or African American medical school applicants and American Indian or Alaska Native medical school applicants had remained relatively stagnant.” It was even noted in the document, Altering the Course: Black Males in Medicine (2015) that “the number of Black or African American male medical school applicants and matriculants had actually decreased since 1978.” Since that document was published in 2015, there have been some modest gains in the number of African American males matriculating to medical school, but there is still a long, long way to go.

Resources


Groups To Join, Network and Connect

Summer Programs

For Non-Traditional Students

  • Texas Academic Fresh Start is a Texas state program aimed at ensuring that a young person who dropped out of college can go back as an adult and "start fresh." College grades and credits more than 10 years old are erased.

Black/African American

LGBTQ+

Under-Represented Applicants

  • UNC School of Medicine offers a year long program called MED EXCEL (Medical Education Development Early eXperience in Clinical Education and Learning). After successful completion of the program, students are given a conditional acceptance to the school of medicine. Read this article for more specifics and contact for more details: Jeanine Simmons, Senior Executive Director, Medical Education and Alumni Development, at jeanine.simmons@med.unc.edu

  • Medical Minority Applicant Registry (Med-MAR) for students historically underrepresented in medicine.

DACA students

Recent Articles

2021 Numbers (Students who applied in 2020 and matriculated in 2021)

In the 2021 cycle, 62,443 (up 9,413 from last year) students applied to medical school and 23,711 (up 606 from last year) were admitted (37.9% acceptance rate).

2021 Fall Applicant, Matriculant, and Enrollment Data Tables

AAMC article dated December 8, 2021: Medical school applicants and enrollments hit record highs; underrepresented minorities lead the surge

2020 Numbers (Students who applied in 2019 and matriculated in 2020)

In the 2020 cycle, 53,030 (down 341 from last year) applied to medical school and 23,105 (up 419 from last year) were admitted (43.5% acceptance rate).

2020 FACTS: Applicants and Matriculants Data

On the December 16, 2020 AAMC article, Enrollment Up at U.S. Medical Schools, the authors give a nice summary of the trends in how schools are meeting their diversity goals. Some excerpts of the article are below:

“According to the AAMC, in 2020, the total number of first-year students identifying as Black or African American, Hispanic, Latino, or of Spanish origin, and American Indian or Alaska Native increased. However, this growth was concentrated at a small number of medical schools, reflecting the important contributions historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions make to the diversity of the physician workforce.”

Highlights include: 

  • Black or African American first-year students increased by 10.5%, to 2,117 nationwide.

  • Black or African American students made up 9.5% of matriculants (first-year students) in 2020, up from 8.8% last year.

  • Black or African American men (first-year students) increased 12.2%, and total enrollment grew 6.2%.

  • First-year students of Hispanic, Latino, or of Spanish origin increased 8.6%, to 2,678.

  • American Indian or Alaska Native first-year students rose 7.8%, to 248.

  • “Women made up 53.4% of applicants, 53.6% of matriculants, and 51.5% of total enrollment. This is thesecond year in a row that women made up the majority of all three groups, and the proportion of women in all three categories has increased annually in recent years. Among first-year students in 2020, the number of women increased and the number of men declined, continuing a five-year trend.”

For a 2019 snapshot (the most recent statistics), read this article: Nation’s Physician Workforce Evolves: More women, a bit older, and toward different specialties (Feb 2, 2021)

2019 Numbers

In 2019, 53,371 applied to medical school and 22,686 were admitted (43% acceptance rate).

According to the AAMC’s Diversity in Medicine: Facts and Figures document from 2019, “most active physicians were White (56.2%) and male (64.1%) (Figures 18 and 19). However, among the youngest cohort of active physicians (34 years of age and younger), women outnumbered men in most racial and ethnic groups (Figures 22-25).”

Diversity in Medicine: Facts and Figures 2019