THE MINORITY MEDICAL EDUCATION PROGRAM

Editor's Introduction

The Foundation hos hod a long and continuing interest in increasing the number of minority physicians. Because minority patients often hove poor access to health core services and tend to rely disproportionately on minority physicians for their core, the Foundation reasoned that increasing the number of minority physicians would help meet one of its goals: improving access to health core services. Among the Foun­dation's first grants in 1972 were medical school scholarships for needy minority students, women, and residents of rural areas. In the 1970s, the Foundation also supported the Meharry Medical College and other historically block medical schools and mode a number of grants to increase minority enrollment in predominantly white medical schools. 

In the mid- l 980s the Foundation's executives looked to expand their efforts to increase the supply of minority physicians. In 1984, for exam­ple, the Foundation authorized the Minority Medical Faculty Develop­ment Program, which supports postdoctoral research by junior faculty members committed to careers in academic medicine. In 1987, the Foundation authorized funding for the Minority Medical Education Pro­gram, a summer enrichment program designed to give qualified minor­ity undergraduates the skills needed to apply successfully to medical school. The program was expanded and reauthorized in 1994 and again in 1998. 

Lois Bergeisen, deputy director of the Minority Medical Education Program and assistant vice president of the Division of Community and Minority Programs at the Association of American Medical Colleges, which serves as the notional program office for the Minority Medical Education Program, and Joel Cantor, former senior evaluation officer at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and current director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University, conducted on eval­uation of the program. This chapter examines the history of the pro­gram and presents, in a nontechnical form, their findings, which were originally published in the September 2, 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Their most important finding was that participation in the program increased the chances of admission to medical school. 

The authors take the opportunity to place the Minority Medical Edu­cation Program in the context of some of the social changes taking place in the country. As they note, considerations of race in the admis­sions process have become controversial; states such as California have banned race as an admissions criterion, and a number of court decisions are leading in the same direction. The Minority Medical Edu­cation Program does not advocate different admissions standards but, rather, helps minority students develop the skills that will enable them to compete on a more equal footing in the admissions process. Despite this important distinction, Bergeisen and Cantor observe that changing attitudes about affirmative action might affect the program in the future.