Changing Missions of Medical Schools and Trends in Medical Student Diversity

Background and Objectives: Improving diversity in the physician workforce continues to be a challenge and a priority for medical schools. Establishing a school-wide mission statement that addresses diversity, equity, and inclusion can help support efforts to increase the number of underrepresented in medicine (URM) graduates. Methods: In this study, we analyzed changes in medical school mission statements between 2013 and 2021 and correlated changes in mission statements with trends in URM student representation. We performed a web search of 136 medical schools’ mission statements and categorized them based on whether they changed their mission statement to add diversity or equity language. We then obtained demographic data of enrolled students at each school and identified the percentage of students identifying as URM in each academic year. We used mixed-effects regression and pair fixed effects linear regression to examine trends in URM student representation and the association between URM student representation and whether a school added diversity and equity content to its mission statement. Results: We found that URM student representation increased by 0.4% per year at schools that added diversity and equity content to their mission statements. Conclusions: Changing medical schools’ mission statements to reflect values of diversity, equity, and inclusion was associated with an increase of less than a 1% per year in URM representation. More research is needed to explore relationships between URM representation and medical school mission statements.