Why Xavier Remains No.1

Louisiana's Xavier University maintains an enviable track record for sending more African American
students to medical school than any other
institution. How do they do it?

By Pearl Stewart

NEW ORLEANS
During his first year at Harvard Medical School, Keith Amos was more than popular — he was needed. Amos quickly became the histology guru of his class. While his classmates struggled, Amos cruised through the microscopic study of tissue structure.
"I had been taught histology so well in undergraduate school that, frankly, I already knew the material," says Amos.
So he ended up tutoring his classmates. "They asked me for help, and I was happy to do it," says Amos. "I enjoyed telling my Harvard classmates that I had attended a small Black university."
Amos graduated in 1992 from Xavier University of Louisiana with a scholarship to Harvard. Now 30, he is a general surgery resident at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University Medical School in St. Louis.
"Keith and students like him sell our program," says Dr. J.W. Carmichael, the man credited with making Xavier's name synonymous with pre-med. In 2000, for the sixth consecutive year, Xavier sent more African American students — 73 — to medical schools than did any other institution. The only Black, Catholic university in the country, Xavier is poised to extend its record in 2001. By mid-May, 73 Xavier graduates were headed to medical schools, and dozens more were entering graduate school in health-related fields.

Radical Moves
Xavier was the No. 1 university granting baccalaureate degrees to African American students in biological and life sciences in 1999-2000, graduating 162 total (see Black Issues, June 7). It also was No. 1 for African American graduates in the physical sciences, with 60 graduates. And according to Xavier officials, 93 percent of its pre-med students that enter medical school graduate. 
Although Carmichael insists that its successful alumni give Xavier its stellar reputation, the alumni and current students say Carmichael, the faculty and three decades of leadership by President Norman Francis are responsible.
"From their first day at Xavier, the students who want to get into medical school are given the support and preparation they need," Francis says. "They are told exactly what they need to do."
Actually, the process begins before the students even set foot in an Xavier classroom.
In the weeks preceding freshmen orientation, Carmichael is busy contacting those who have indicated an interest in medicine, sending them information and establishing rapport. "I can't say enough about Dr. Carmichael and everything he does for that program," Amos says.
But the real secret of the program's success, Carmichael reveals, was a radical decision in recent years to standardize the freshman pre-med math and science curricula, a move that required unprecedented agreement and cooperation from the faculty.
"The key to this change was the adoption of a philosophy that content, teaching methodology and rate of presentation should be determined by the department as a whole, rather than by the whim of individual lecturers or textbook authors," says Carmichael.
The pre-med departments also developed a series of workbooks that lay out exactly what students need to learn and contain sample problems and references to the textbook for those who need more information about the topic.
Carmichael says that by agreeing to an overarching philosophy, individual faculty members gave up some autonomy in their classrooms for a common goal: to get students into medical school, and once there, to have them prepared to succeed.
It was especially important that Xavier adapt to changes in the MCAT that required students to excel in verbal reasoning as well as the traditional subject areas. Francis and Carmichael are particularly pleased about Xavier students' strong performance in verbal reasoning. "We feel that it's because our students receive such a well-rounded foundation," Francis says, noting the university's broad core curriculum requirements.
Carmichael attributes it to his requirements that students be well-read and conversant on topical issues. Thus the summer reading assignments.
On the Xavier pre-med program's Web site, <www.xupremed.com>, students view a timetable of tasks they need to complete in every phase of their undergraduate experience. The site also contains a link for parents, explaining to them what students should be doing during their summer vacations, although many pre-med students spend their summers conducting research around the country.
One of those students, Alanna Morris, a 2001 summa cum laude graduate from Atlanta, will enter Harvard Medical School in the fall with two summer research projects under her belt — one at Columbia and another at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF).
"Xavier does a good job by giving you a starting point," Morris says. "They post a list of summer opportunities and it's up to the student to take it from there." But Carmichael offers students more than just the list. He posts the names of Xavier graduates who worked on the projects in previous summers, so the interested students can contact them.
In Morris' case, the Columbia project — measuring the amounts of elemental carbon in the New York City air — related to her academic minor, chemistry. The UCSF project — an effort to create a fusion protein — required her to use her biology major.
"I definitely think those experiences were helpful when I applied to medical school," she says. Although she chose Harvard, where she received a scholarship, Morris also was accepted by six other medical schools, including Columbia, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.
Amos, too, had an interest in research during his undergraduate years. That interest increased at Harvard, where Amos became a 1995-1996 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Scholar. He spent that year at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., returning to Harvard to earn his medical degree in 1997. Two years later, Amos received the prestigious Society of University Surgeons Resident Research Award, which included a $30,000 grant.
Like Morris, Amos credits Xavier's immersion tactics — offering a wealth of information and opportunities to its students — with helping him prepare for a career in medicine.
"But it's also more than that," Amos says. "They bring in people who prepare you for the ‘real' world of medicine, which includes a lot of things you can't get from books."
That is the part of the pre-med program that the university president is most proud of.
"We think our students leave here with more than an education in a particular discipline," Francis explains. "We think they leave here with an understanding about what they are going to face out there, what the real challenges are."
"I was a Black student from a rural town in Louisiana, and I hadn't seen much before I got to Xavier," Amos recalls. But armed with the self-
confidence he derived from Xavier's pre-med program, Amos says he was able to adapt when he arrived at the top medical school in the country. "It helped that I was also academically prepared."