A growing path to medical school

By Rebecca Greenberg, Published June 20, 2014

​Image: iStockphoto

​Editor's note: This is an abridged version of an article from the AAMC Reporter, published by the Association of American Medical Colleges. It is reprinted with permission.

Nearly one-half of all U.S. undergraduates attend community college at some point in their education, according to data from theAmerican Association of Community Colleges. Increasingly, medical school applicants are reflective of this national trend.

“I think there are many people who are not going to college in the traditional, right-out-of-high school sense,” said Dr. Henry Sondheimer, senior director of admissions at theAssociation of American Medical Colleges.

Many high school graduates take community college courses to save money, stay closer to home and establish an academic record before transferring to a four-year university. A large portion of community college students come from minority backgrounds and are among the first in their family to pursue higher education.

A different kind of student

A 2013 AAMC report on diversity showed that in 2012 almost 33 percent of medical school applicants had a community college experience — up from 29 percent in 2002. Of this group, 41 percent were accepted to medical school.

In the past, medical school admissions committees might have balked at applicants with community college backgrounds, but attitudes are changing. Now, many admissions faculty see these institutions as a stepping stone.

“We feel that people who use the community college system often have traveled a greater distance — more often they come from disadvantaged backgrounds that require them to use [that] system,” said Dr. Mark Henderson, associate dean for admissions at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine. “We don’t count it against them in any regard.”

According to the AAMC Medical School Admission Requirements database, most medical schools accept at least some credits from community colleges. Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine recently voted to accept community college credit for the first time.

Supporting the pathway

Dr. Efrain Talamantes at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is an expert on community college enrollment among medical students and a lead researcher for the 2013 AAMC diversity report. He became interested in community college as a premedical pathway for Latino students when he was a medical student at UCLA.

“I think we know that, historically, community college focused on trade-tech professions, but now with more efforts at the community college level to get students to transfer, it has become increasingly important to think about how we support this pathway so that students get the training earlier on, through opportunities to be in research labs and summer shadowing programs that will continue to motivate them to stay committed to medicine,” said Talamantes, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at UCLA.

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