Goal 2: Recruitment & Retention

The Officer Education Program’s (OEP) primary goal in Year Five was to expand the diversity of its talent pool by focusing on campus recruitment and utilizing the full potential of cadet peer groups. The virtual environment necessitated by COVID-19 provided new opportunities to leverage our participation in recruitment efforts across the various campuses supported by OEP programs. By deploying our cadets and working with their respective student organizations to schedule recruiting and information sessions, OEP was able to reach a highly diverse pool of candidates across the greater Metro Detroit area and its respective universities.

LSA’s faculty initiatives include its Collegiate Fellows program, which aims to recruit and retain 50 exceptional early-career scholars in all liberal arts fields with a sustained commitment to building an inclusive and diverse intellectual community. Since 2017, the College has successfully recruited 37 Collegiate Fellows (from a total of 3,296 applications) to 22 different departments in all three divisions of Humanities, Natural Science and Social Science. All selected Fellows are evaluated for tenure-track positions in LSA departments. To date, a total of 35 Fellows have entered or will enter the tenure track based on accepted offers (a 95% transition success rate). To complement Fellows’ departmental mentoring plans, the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) continues to provide professional development offerings to support successful pathways to tenure for early-career scholars with DEI commitments, create a sense of community within and across cohorts, build professional networks and connect Fellows with relevant U-M resources.

In an effort to diversify the health care workforce, Michigan Medicine established a portfolio of pipeline programs ranging from precollege to post-baccalaureate. In light of COVID-19 constraints and the disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion (OHEI) delivered pipeline programs virtually in the summer of 2020 within a national landscape where numerous summer pipeline programs were cancelled. To assess the impact of virtual formats on learner growth and development in areas critical to health care professions, we conducted a comparative analysis of our standard program evaluation data. Measures surveyed included service orientation, college readiness, comfort with diversity, cultural awareness, leadership, empathy, resilience and growth. Preliminary findings indicate that a virtual pipeline program format could be leveraged to reach more learners in communities underrepresented in medicine while remaining within budgetary constraints. This is a promising first step in understanding how to hybridize pipeline programs in a way that maximizes efforts to diversify the next generation of health care professionals.