When Valerie Santos thinks about why she pursued medicine, she thinks of her grandmother, an immigrant from Guatemala.
Ten years ago, her grandmother was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and died shortly after. Santos, 28, wonders if a Spanish-speaking doctor leading her grandmother’s care could have caught the disease earlier.
“It just made me realize, ‘What could have been done, what could have been prevented, how could my grandmother have been better served by a doctor who was Spanish-speaking?’” Santos said.
Now Santos, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Illinois Chicago, worries that other patients could see similar obstacles if progress toward increasing diversity in medical students slows down or takes a step back following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2023 that race cannot be a factor in college admissions.
In the first year since the decision was handed down, enrollment for both Black and Hispanic medical school students fell by more than 10% nationally for the 2024-25 school year, according to figures released earlier this year by the American Association of Medical Colleges.
The trend is worse for Black and Latino Illinois residents. The number of Hispanic students who enrolled in medical school anywhere in the country dropped 42.6% between the 2023-24 school year and this year, according to AAMC data. The number of Black students decreased 6.5% while mixed race students decreased by 8.3%. Meanwhile, the number of white students increased by 13.2%.
Other factors are also at play in falling enrollment, said Norma Poll-Hunter, senior director for equity, diversity and inclusion at the AAMC. Legislation and other strategies targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs in some states could be partially to blame for the downward trend, which started before President Donald Trump took office, she said.
But diversity advocates say the shift, if it continues in years to come, is concerning. As the country tries to combat a physician shortage, medical education is more important than ever, Poll-Hunter said.
“When we think about addressing the health care needs of the nation, we want to make sure education is accessible to everyone who’s interested in becoming a physician,” Poll-Hunter said.
Among the half-dozen medical schools in the Chicago area, it’s harder to see any trend in the change in the racial makeup of their student bodies, although none of the schools provided a racial breakdown of first-year students, who would have gone through the admissions process after the Supreme Court decision.
The state’s largest, the University of Illinois College of Medicine, saw an overall drop in Black students between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, even though total enrollment increased to 1,334 students, AAMC data shows. In 2023-24, 162 Black students were enrolled; that fell to 145 students this year. The number of Latino students dropped slightly to 126, while more Asian and white students enrolled.
“The College of Medicine is one of the most diverse medical schools in the United States,” a UIC spokesperson said in a statement. “The University of Illinois College of Medicine is committed to its mission to advance health for everyone through outstanding education, research, clinical care, and social responsibility.”
The other five medical schools in the Chicago area — Northwestern University, Loyola University Chicago, University of Chicago, Rush University and Rosalind Franklin University — didn’t have large fluctuations in the number of students of color in their overall student bodies in the last year.
Although Loyola’s Stritch School of Medicine didn’t see a significant drop in applicants or matriculants of color, Dean Sam Marzo isn’t sure what the future holds in light of Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI programs aimed at increasing diversity at institutions that receive federal money.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Marzo said. “Our mission as a university, as a medical school, is to train people of all faiths and creeds, and diversity is very important to us.”
Still, the drop in Black and Latino students enrolled nationally and among Illinois residents is a symptom of a larger problem of diversity in medicine, according to Dr. LaMenta Conway, who founded the I am Abel Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Maywood that provides scholarships and resources to underrepresented students.
“It is pointing toward a more disturbing climate,” she said. “To me, that points to the fact that society is not recognizing the value. I don’t know how we could actually be race-neutral. We don’t live in a race-neutral world.”
Research by the National Institutes of Health in 2021 showed that diversity in the medical field not only increased cultural competency, but improved patient outcomes. For many medical students, that’s paramount.
“The implications of having the drop by 11%, 10%, even in this past year, is so much more far-reaching than people really think about,” Santos said. “It’s not just about how many students are Black, are Latino, are Native Pacific Islander, it affects the patients. People’s lives are at stake here.”
Kenichi Haynie, a fourth-year medical student at UIC, said it’s already difficult being Black in a medical setting, where he is used to being one of the only Black people.
“When I walk in [to a patient room] and they’re rattling off their breakfast order instead of acknowledging that I’m a medical student … we’re at a place where we don’t feel welcome, that we’re a respected member of the medical community,” Haynie said.
Haynie, 27, said he doesn’t see many Black men at the school’s Peoria campus. His class of around 60 students has about 10 Black students, he estimates, and that number has fallen to three Black students in the most recent class. UIC did not release stats specific to individual classes or campuses.
The Supreme Court decision and its effects worry Haynie for future generations.
“I want to be able to inspire faith in my patients,” he said. “But steadily we are erasing the diversity in medicine. … If we do not fix the issue, the person that suffers is the patient.”
Medical schools are bound by law not to consider race in their admissions process, but there are ways institutions can still prioritize diversity, Poll-Hunter said. The AAMC is encouraging universities to analyze their current programs and increase recruitment and outreach efforts to a wide array of applicants.
“There are a lot of opportunities to recruit and attract the next generation of physicians, and that work has to continue,” she said.