If the United States is serious about diversifying its health care workforce, then medical schools can't afford to overlook campuses where many students from underrepresented minorities and low-income families get their start in higher education.

Welcome to America's community colleges.

That was the overall conclusion from authors of a study titled "Community College Pathways: Improving the U.S. Physician Workforce Pipeline." The study recently was published online(journals.lww.com) ahead of print by the journal Academic Medicine.

Lead author Efrain Talamantes, M.D., M.B.A., told AAFP News that he and his co-authors set out to discover the role community colleges play as a pathway to medical school admission. The primary outcome measure was acceptance to a U.S. allopathic medical school or medical scientist training program (MSTP). Additional outcome measures were students' plans to practice in an underserved community or to work primarily with minority populations.

Understanding that learners use community colleges in a variety of ways, researchers defined four community college pathways:

In this setting, students who attended community college after high-school graduation were considered "traditional" students.

Talamantes, an internal medicine physician, is a National Research Service Award Scholar in the Division of Internal Medicine and Health Service's Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. He said the community college research was done with the blessing of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which administers the Medical College Admission Test.

"This study shows that students are getting into medical school from the community college pathway and that is hugely important. Many of those who are getting in are minority students and the first in their families to go to college," Talamantes added.

However, researchers also found that students in one particular pathway -- those who graduated from high school and then attended community college before they transferred to a four-year university -- were less likely to be accepted into medical school when compared with those in the other pathways.

Specifically, authors noted that 17,518 students (out of 40,491 applicants) matriculated into medical school in 2012; of that total, 4,920 used one of the community college pathways. So overall, 11 percent of those who matriculated attended community college during high school, and 12 percent attended community college after graduating from a four-year university.

See the article here:

Are U.S. Medical Schools Overlooking Community College Grads?