Impact of holistic review on student interview pool diversity

Diversity in the physician workforce lags behind the rapidly changing US population. Since the gateway to becoming a physician is medical school, diversity must be addressed in the admissions process. The Association of American Medical Colleges has implemented a Holistic Review Initiative aimed at assisting medical schools with broadening admission criteria to include relevant, mission-driven attributes and experiences in addition to academic preparation to identify applicants poised to meet the needs of a diverse patient population. More evidence is needed to determine whether holistic review results in a more diverse selection process. One of the keys to holistic review is to apply holistic principles in all stages of the selection process to ensure qualified applicants are not overlooked. This study examines whether the use of holistic review during application screening at a new medical school increased the diversity of applicants selected for interview. Using retrospective data from the first five application cycles at the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine (OUWB), the author compared demographic and experiential differences between the applicants selected using holistic review, including experiences, attributes and academic metrics, to a test sample selected solely using academic metrics. The dataset consisted of the total group of applicants selected for interview in 2011 through 2015 using holistic review (n = 2773) and the same number of applicants who would have been selected for an interview using an academic-only selection model (n = 2773), which included 1204 applicants who were selected using both methods (final n = 4342). The author used a combination of cross-tabulation and analysis of variance to identify differences between applicants selected using holistic review and applicants in the test sample selected using only academics. The holistic review process yielded a significantly higher than expected percent of female ( adj. resid . = 13.2 , p