Postbaccalaureate Medical/Dental Education Preparatory Program (MEDPREP) at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

Abstract

Between 1972 and 1998, the state and federally funded Medical/Dental Education Preparatory Program (MEDPREP) at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine served approximately 900 qualified minority and disadvantaged students, in an effort to increase the number of underrepresented-minority (URM) students accepted into and retained in health professions schools. To help students improve their application credentials, this post-baccalaureate program establishes high expectations for student progress, designs individual curricula, offers extensive academic and personal counseling, has its own teaching faculty, and operates in a specially equipped, designated facility. This supportive educational environment has demonstrated success. By 1998 over 500 MEDPREP students had been accepted into medical or other health professions schools, and 86% of them had graduated or were scheduled to graduate. And while the number of new URM entrants to medical schools declined nationwide from 1995 to 1997, 70 URM students from MEDPREP matriculated to 28 different allopathic medical schools, eight entered three different osteopathic medical schools, and two entered dental schools. Recent data indicate that the score changes of Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) repeaters who were MEDPREP students were larger than those of all MCAT repeaters reported by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). In fact, the MEDPREP repeaters' score changes were two to nearly six times greater than the overall changes reported by the AAMC. These gains suggest that a carefully designed, long-term post-baccalaureate intervention such as MEDPREP can increase the pool of qualified URM and disadvantaged students accepted into and retained in health professions schools.