Program Offers Disadvantaged Teens a Gateway to Health and Science Careers

Abstract

AT A TIME WHEN EMPLOYMENT IS hard to find even for adult fulltime workers, many high school students would consider themselves fortunate to secure a minimum-wage job for the summer. Only those with luck or connections might be able to obtain a position that helps them build experience toward a future career. But thanks to an innovative program that focuses specifically on those least likely to find such opportunities, a group of New York City teenagers spent the summer as research interns in some of the most prestigious laboratories and hospitals in the Northeast. And that’s just one facet of a 4-year high-school program designed to prepare students for highly skilled careers in health and science. These students are enrolled in the Gateway Institute for Pre-College Education (http://www.gateway.cuny.edu /Gateway_Site/home.html), which has helped prepare low-income and minority high school students for careers in medicine, science, and technology since 1986. According to a recent survey of the 85% of Gateway graduates who have been tracked, about 80% of them have graduated from 4-year colleges and 10% have gone on to medical school—30 times the national rate for a ninthgrade cohort, said Gateway director Morton Slater, PhD, who has been with the program since its inception. Inspired by this success, Gateway has launched a similar program in Boston, which has just recruited its third group of students. In the coming years, physicians and educators committed to the program hope to replicate the Gateway approach around the country. “This program is urgently needed in more areas,” said Howard Hiatt, MD, a member of the Gateway Advisory Board who is former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.