The Supreme Court of the United States ruling last year that colleges and universities can no longer take race and ethnicity into consideration as a specific basis for granting admission delivered a significant blow to diversity efforts on campuses nationwide. This ruling applies to medical education, where the lack of a diverse physician workforce is a known factor that leads to health care inequalities.
Without affirmative action, how can we recruit the next generation of physicians to care for people from underrepresented groups more effectively?
One of us, Galvez, is a pediatric hand surgeon, and the other, Padilla, is an obstetric anesthesiologist and critical care physician. Both of us started our long journey to medicine at community colleges, where we were later able to transfer to four-year colleges before entering medical school. We thrived in medical school and know that other people who follow our educational path can be equally successful—but more medical schools have to give community college students that chance.
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In this post–affirmative action era, community college attendance could be a proxy for race and ethnicity in medical schools admissions. Admissions officers need to consider this educational path as a strategy to diversify the physician workforce.
Latinos have become the largest minority ethnic group in the U.S., and there are not enough physicians of Latino descent to serve them. This is important because of cultural and language differences, but also because, by 2050, it is predicted that roughly one third of Americans will be of Latino descent. Latino physicians comprise only 6.9 percent of the U.S. physician workforce.
As the co-founders of National Latino Physician…
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