For the first time since 2007, Black student enrollment in the medical school at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) could top four this academic year.
With the exception of Asians, who made up the largest group of students of color (12.4 percent) at the medical school in fall 2015, other groups lagged way behind or didn’t exist at Oregon’s only public health and research university and the state’s only public academic health center, which includes two teaching hospitals and schools of medicine, nursing and dentistry.
Recruitment and outreach
Five Blacks are projected to be among the medical school’s 2016-17 incoming class — two from Oregon, one from California, one from Washington and one from New York. The first day of school is when OHSU administrators will do an official headcount of who’s in the classroom, but for now, they are relishing a bright forecast.
“For us, that’s a big gain,” says Leslie Garcia, the school’s interim chief diversity officer and assistant vice provost, of finally reaching five. That’s because, for years, the number of entering Black medical students at OHSU has been tiny or stuck on zero, as in 2013 and 2015. At the Portland-based school, the Black population is slightly over 6 percent and only at 2 percent in the state of Oregon.
But what’s made the difference in the upcoming academic year and allowed the school to “move that dial,” says Garcia, is hammering a “strategic diversity plan” for recruiting largely in-state for students. It also includes brokering partnerships with other academic institutions, civil rights and social service organizations, and K-12 schools with high numbers of Blacks and Hispanics.
Such partnerships, she says, can help expose children of color to medicine as a career option. “It’s a work in progress,” says Garcia of the school’s multipronged plan for diversity and inclusion that has been evolving since 2010.
