Health educators keep close count of the race and ethnic origins of their students, as well as their faculty and staff members, and not just because recruiting minorities is the right thing to do, they say.

Since the national Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its landmark study, "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care," in 2002, health science schools have focused on diversifying the graduates they send to the workforce. The IOM study found “significant variation in the rates of medical procedures by race, even when insurance status, income, age and severity of conditions are comparable,” and determined that “bias, prejudice and stereotyping on the part of healthcare providers” may contribute to the problem. "More minority healthcare providers are needed, especially since they are more likely to serve in minority and medically underserved communities," the study found.

Leaders at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), the University of Memphis Loewenberg School of Nursing and Baptist College of Health Sciences say they are devoted to attracting minority students and teachers, and describe a variety of means for drawing candidates.
At UTHSC graduations this spring for 698 students, 68 African-Americans and 12 Latino-Americans were among the graduates. The number of African-American students enrolled at UTHSC has hovered at 12 to 13 percent since 2011. 
The new UTHSC chief academic officer, Lori S. Gonzalez, PhD, says one of her jobs will be trying to increase that percentage by 5 percent, to reflect the size of Tennessee's black population.  
“The Health Center believes it's important that we model the demographics of Tennessee, and try to educate healthcare providers that look like the residents of the state,” Gonzalez said. “So when you look at the African-American population of the state right now, in that last Census about 17 percent of the population is African-American. Right now at UT Health Science Center, the population of African-American students is 12 percent, so that means we have a way to go to meet this demographic profile that we'd like see in this state."

The U.S. Department of Education requires schools to ask about race and ethnicity on applications, but students do not have to answer the questions. The UTHSC Office of Academic, Faculty and Student Affairs said the school gives strong preference to Tennessee applicants who meet admission standards, though acceptance requirements vary among the 34 programs. At the College of Medicine, for instance, applications for the 165 places in a class are only considered from residents of Tennessee and its eight contiguous states, and children of UT alumni regardless of their residence.

Lin Zhan, dean of the Loewenberg School of Nursing at University of Memphis, which enrolls about 1,000, said 26 percent of undergraduate students and 48 percent of graduate students are minorities. Zhan, PhD and RN, said diversity is one of four "core values" at the school.

At Baptist College of Health Sciences, Dr. Arnold Arredondo, dean of enrollment management, said 42 percent of the 1,142 students are African-American, while 2 percent are Hispanic and 2 percent are Asian. Seventy percent of the college's students are in the nursing program. 

Arredondo, PhD, who calls himself “a minority who benefited from education opportunities,” said Baptist has gotten help recruiting minority students from such organizations as the Memphis Talent Dividend, the Emmanuel Center and Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association. 

Gonzalez and Zhan said increasing minority representation among faculty and staff is one way to draw students. Gonzalez, who became UTHSC vice chancellor of Academic, Faculty and Student Affairs in June, said Chancellor Steve J. Schwab, MD, and other administrators see faculty and staff diversity as an "institutional imperative.”
“One of the kinds of recruitment in higher ed that's the most successful for yielding a diverse pool of applicants for a job is called targeted recruitment,” she said. “Just reach out and say, ‘We'd really love it if you'd apply for this job.’”

And current faculty can be emissaries, she said. "Faculty members can go to their professional meetings and try to meet people. They get those connections where they know the strong programs, where they know the best PhD and the best MD who might be interested in a faculty career and encourage them to apply."
Gonzalez previously was provost and executive vice chancellor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina and spent 20 years at the University of Kentucky, ending her time there as dean and professor for the College of Health Sciences.  She was drawn to Tennessee because it's a freestanding academic health center, she said. And, "I really have to tell you I was excited about the diversity here. We talk about it, we write plans about it, but this campus already had a considerable amount of diversity." 
Of 1,339 regular faculty members employed at UTHSC last fall, 1,000 were white, 210 were Asian, 75 were black and 50 were Hispanic/Latino. Enrollment for fall 2014 included 2,109 white students, 362 black students, 245 Asian students and 57 Hispanic/Latino students.
Gonzalez said one longstanding diversity effort called TIP, or Tennessee Institutes for Pre-Professionals, brings college undergraduates to the Memphis campus in the summer. More than 1,600 students from under-represented groups have graduated through the program, she said.  
“They may be first generation (attending college), they may be low-income students, they may have a military status, they may be under-represented,” Gonzalez said of the TIP participants. The potential health-science students learn interview skills and receive coaching on standardized exams. The Office of Student Academic Support Services and Inclusion connects with them when they arrive on campus. “They make a point to email, to call, to keep in touch,” Gonzalez said. 
 “We're also trying to develop closer partnerships with historically black colleges and universities so those programs can be pipelines,” she said, noting that it's competitive work. "One of the issues all health sciences deal with is, when you have these wonderful students they can go anywhere they want. The challenge is talking them into coming to UT.”
Among UTHSC graduates in May, 410 were women and 288 were men. "Nationally, you're seeing a shift, and it started in the '80s, and it's actually really pretty prevalent, that fewer males are seeking or obtaining bachelor's degrees," Gonzalez said. "Then there are just some disciplines that are either male- or female-dominated. One that's female-dominated is nursing, as you might expect," she said. 

“But the nursing college has been very purposeful to try to increase the number of males they have in their programs. Nationally when you look at the nursing workforce, 5.5 percent are male. At the UT College of Nursing, 9 percent of the students are male.”

Like Gonzalez, the dean of the U of M's nursing school, Lin Zhan, stressed that admissions decisions are based on academic ability: "We admit students based on their academic performance, not based on their race, their gender or their age or their social class," criteria published in the university catalog. 

Zhan, a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, talked about the minority presence among faculty as a selling point. "We publicize our faculty on our website, and I believe that the minority faculty who have achieved academically attract and serve as a role model for minority students," she said. 

"We have 46 percent of the faculty, including me, are from ethnically diverse backgrounds. If you look at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing national data, their average in terms of faculty diversity is around 20 percent."

In 2014, the undergraduate classes at the Loewenberg School included 113 African-American students, 21 Asian Pacific Islanders, and six Hispanic non-white students. At the graduate level, there were 80 African-Americans, 10 Asian Americans and one Hispanic non-white. Of about 1,000 students, 94 were male, including 12.4 percent of undergraduates and 9.5 percent in the graduate program. 

Like UTHSC, the Loewenberg school provides after-class support services for minority students, Zhan said, and the student association has a branch for minority nursing students.

“For the graduate school, we have an executive leadership program, a federal grant to recruit minority nurses, to develop them as leaders and nurse managers.”

She said about 40 percent of those students are from ethnic minority backgrounds.

RELATED LINKS: 

Institute of Medicine, www.iom.edu

Baptist College of Health Sciences, www.bchs.edu

University of Tennessee Health Science Center, www.uthsc.edu

Loewenberg School of Nursing, www.memphis.edu/nursing