Texas sees drop in Black med students
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The number of first-year Black medical students has dropped sharply in Texas, new data shows.
Why it matters: Students who represent minority populations are more likely to care for those populations when they become doctors, Chinwe Efuribe, a Hutto pediatrician who runs mentoring programs with the Austin Black Physicians Association, tells Axios.
What they're saying: "We're more likely to be working in the community, more likely to participate in community health fairs and more likely to be involved in relationship building — and that leads to increased life expectancy and better health outcomes generally," Efuribe said.
- Doctors from similar backgrounds might have a better sense of what questions to ask patients and what cultural factors are at play with health challenges, Efuribe said.
By the numbers: There are 195 Black medical students in Texas this year, down from 248 at the start of the 2021-22 academic year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which has collected data on this topic since 1978.
- Less than 10% of Texas medical students are Black. By comparison, 13.6% of the state population is Black.
The latest: Medical school student enrollment is also down nationally, following the Supreme Court decision to strike down affirmative action in higher education.
Between the lines: The downturn in new Black medical school students shows that "policies meant to address systemic inequality have not been institutionalized to fully address these issues if removing them can negatively impact admission this quickly," Israel Herndon, who does graduate work at the University of Texas on the history of medicine in the African and African Diaspora Studies program, tells Axios.
Meanwhile, this year's UT freshman class is just as diverse as previous classes, owing largely to automatic admission of the state's top-ranked high school students.
Zoom in: At Dell Medical School in Austin, as of September 2024, 37% of students identify as white; 30.5% as Asian; 15% as Hispanic, Latino or of Spanish origin; 9% as Black or African American; and 3.5% as multiple races or ethnicities.
- Axios has filed a request under the Texas Public Information Act for changes in those percentages over time.
- Dell Med did not respond to an Axios interview request with the school dean.
The intrigue: The declines are "much larger than we would expect," even taking the Supreme Court decision into account, Norma Poll-Hunter, senior director of the Association of American Medical Colleges' human capital portfolio, tells Axios.
The bottom line: "Every doctor brings with them a unique perspective to the profession, and when certain populations are not fully represented, this means that there are certain questions, approaches, and care that are missing from the field," Herndon says.