Figure 2-1. Underrepresented minorities as a percentage of total enrollment.

SOURCE: Minority Students in Medical Education: Facts and Figures VII, AAMC, 1993.

This is not to say there have not been successes in the last 25 years. The nation's historically black colleges and universities, which once educated three-quarters of all African-American doctors (Odegaard, 1977), have continued to play an important role in producing minority physicians. A number of other institutions, particularly some medical schools, and organizations such as the National Medical Fellowships, Inc., the National Urban Coalition, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the National Medical Association, and a number of private foundations have put significant resources into efforts to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the health care professions and other science-intensive disciplines.

Figure 2-2 presents the colleges that provided the largest numbers of medical school matriculants in 1992. Such efforts alone, however, cannot overcome the disadvantages of an education obtained in the poorly funded and staffed schools that educate many minority students, or the lack of a concerted commitment by a broader spectrum of schools toward a larger minority presence (College Board, 1985; NRC [National Research Council], 1989).