Recruitment Office Targets Minorities

While the admissions office at Harvard Medical School says it has no formal strategy for increasing recruitment, the school's Office of Recruitment and Retention says it has been stepping up efforts to recruit underrepresented minorities.

The office opened in 1969 as an affirmative action recruiting program, the result of campus student pressure. Since then, the program's focus has been expanded to recruitment and support for all underrepresented minorities--including Blacks, hispanics and Native Americans-says Jamila Franklin--Kenea, associate director of the office.

Franklin-Kenea, who has worked in the program for about two years, says she has created several projects aimed at increasing minority recrutiment.

"We want to make sure that everyone who is interested knows that Harvard is interested in them," she says.

Franklin-Kenea says that as the number of applications to medical schools has declined nationwide, the number of minority applications has fallen with it, although the number of applications did increase this year.

According to a study by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the number of applications from underrepresented minorities dropped from 3541 in 1981 to 3049 in 1989.

For this reason, she says, it is important to look far ahead into the future, and spark interest in medical school. She says that's why her office has coordinated visits to local elementary and secondary schools.

"We're trying to plant the seeds for kids who might not have even considered medicine," she says.

In addition, Kamela-Franklin says her office has produced a promotional videotape, participated in local career days and organized personal visits to schools across the country.

Franklin-Kenea says that her efforts have been successful in both attracting minority applicants and retaining them.

The Medical School currently has 118 underrepresented minority students, which make up about 17 percent of the student body.