Black Student Recruitment at the University of Washington

As a state university with a long-stated tradition of offering equal opportunity to all qualified students, the University of Washington granted the MD degree to two black students during the first 20 years of its medical school's history. It is impossible to tell how many black students applied and were rejected, for existing records give no evidence of race. Recognizing that conventional recruiting and admissions policies were not adequate to attract black students into medicine, an active program of counseling and information dissemination was started in 1968.

The first major step was taken when the admissions officers of the School of Medicine and the School of Dentistry asked the black physicians and dentists of the Puget Sound area to begin a series of meetings. In these meetings the problems of motivation and counseling of black students enrolled in undergraduate programs on our own university campus were identified. These students had