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Lawmaker: State medical school needs greater racial, geographical diversity Saturday, Oct 20, 2007 By John Lyon Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - A state lawmaker expressed concern Friday over racial and geographical disparities among students admitted this year to Arkansas' only medical school. Rep. Stephanie Flowers, D-Pine Bluff, raised the concerns while reviewing a report to the Legislative Council on 2007 admissions to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' College of Medicine. Flowers asked Tom South, the school's director of admissions and financial aid, how many minorities were admitted to the College of Medicine as new students this year. South said that of the 160 students admitted, 11 were black, Hispanic or American Indian. Those are the three racial groups that the federal government classifies as under-represented in medicine. The students were chosen from 30 minority applicants, South said. "The number of minority applicants that are applying to medical school has been disappointing to us as far as the numbers," he said. "We would like to increase, and we are making every effort to increase, the number of those applicants that are from groups under-represented in medicine." South presented the legislators with a map showing the home counties of Arkansans in this year's freshman class. According to the map, the largest number of students, 36, came from Pulaski County, followed by Washington County with 11. Flowers noted that relatively few of the students are from counties in South Arkansas and the Delta, the parts of the state with the largest minority populations. "What's so great about Pulaski County that we're not getting out in the rest of the state?" Flowers said. "We are trying to address that problem," South said. "We have hired someone within the last seven months that we have sent to, I think, six or seven schools around the United States to take a look at their programs and what they're doing to address this issue." Under state law, the first 150 student positions in each freshman class at the medical school must be distributed equally among the state's four congressional districts. South said the school received 123 applications from the 2nd District in Central Arkansas this year, compared with 50 from the 1st District, 62 from the 3rd District and 61 from the 4th District. More students would be interested in applying for medical school if they had a better grounding in science earlier in their education, South said. "We're at the end of the pipeline, as far as this goes," he said. "We're going to work more closely with the colleges and universities, but we also realize that we've got to get to these students when they're in junior high. They've got to get the sciences built up." Flowers said UAMS may also want to look at the makeup of its faculty. "People want to come where they feel welcome," she said. |
