PHOTO BY BRUCE POWELL
Robert Sanchez, MS2, Jason Espinoza, MS4, Jennifer Jones, MS2, and Christopher Smyre, MS1
A model approach to diversity Pritzker graduates many more underrepresented minority students than the national average. A new study explains why. BY MICHAEL MCHUGH
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he Pritzker School of Medicine’s commitment to diversity made a big impression on undergraduate Robert Sanchez when he attended a medical school fair at Yale University. Three years later, he still had the Pritzker flyer he picked up that day. Sanchez, MS2, credits the leadership of Holly J. Humphrey, MD’83, dean for medical education, and the rest of the administration with living up to the commitment that inspired him to choose Pritzker. “I wanted to be at a place that had different students who were diverse, who had experiences similar to my own but who also came from different backgrounds,” he said. Diversity has become a hot-button issue in the health care industry, as changing demographics have led to physicians treating patients from increasingly diverse backgrounds. And those rolls are likely to grow as medical insurance becomes available to millions more patients through the Affordable Care Act. Historically, medical schools have done a poor job recruiting
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and graduating underrepresented minority students. “The health of the population will be aided and improved by having a health care workforce that is more similar to the population itself demographically,” Humphrey said. Pritzker has done a better job than most of its peer institutions in attracting and graduating underrepresented minority (URM) students. In 2011, for example, 18 percent of Pritzker’s matriculating students were URMs, which the school defines as African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans. The Association of American Medical Colleges also collects national data on the amount of diversity among national matriculants, including ethnic and racial characteristics. While definitions of what constitutes underrepresentation in medicine vary by school and region, the amount of diversity in national matriculants is still strikingly lower than that found at the Pritzker School of Medicine. The reasons Sanchez chose Pritzker over other top institutions are echoed in the findings of a qualitative study of current and former students. “The Minority Student Voice at One Medical School:
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION