A state university's model program to increase the number of its disadvantaged students who matriculate into health...

Health professions schools often provide support for minority and disadvantaged students in high school or in a single college summer program. However, long-term support for students during their undergraduate years is also crucial. Since 1990, San Diego State University (SDSU), a large urban public university, has implemented the Health Careers Opportunity Program (HCOP) to increase the number of the university's disadvantaged students (most of whom are from minority groups) who matriculate into medical, dental, veterinary, and physician assistant schools. The program's 11 components, each dedicated to some form of educational intervention and support, emphasize developing students' collaborative learning skills, fostering their pride in accomplishment, and helping them achieve positive self-images and self-confidence; these goals are linked with building students' analytical and problem-solving skills. Weekly journals kept by students' mentors serve as an "early warning system" for "bad" feelings, attitudes, and behaviors that reflect students' personal problems and correlate with lower grades, and help the program staff work intensively with students immediately, before problems become severe. The SDSU's HCOP increased the number of disadvantaged (mostly minority) students staying in the prehealth career path (not counting those in the schools of nursing and public health) from 70 in 1989 to 360 in 1995. In 1992 through 1994, the students who had completed the HCOP's Summer Academic Program (to help them bridge into a science curriculum) had pass rates for entry-level math, writing competency, and math placement that were consistently higher than the rates for other SDSU students. The overall grade-point average of HCOP students in the spring of 1995 (3.05) was significantly higher than the overall GPA of all minority students in prehealth training before the HCOP began (2.59 in 1988). The number of SDSU's minority students accepted by health professions schools (primarily medical schools) rose significantly from six in 1990 to 23 in 1995. It is clear that the labor-intensive interventions of the HCOP throughout students' years at SDSU until they matriculate into health professions schools are working.