372 Equal chances on medical student intake and attainment: does migration background matters?

Abstract EP1.2, e-Poster Terminal 1, September 3, 2025, 13:05 - 13:55 Aims While research shows that a diverse workforce contributes positively to better patient care, and diverse classrooms contribute to better learning outcomes for students, the percentage of students with migration background in a medical school is relatively small. There are many indications that this group of students is faced with more challenges to accomplish their study successfully. Our research aim was to gain insight in the possible ‘leaky pipeline’ in our medical school and to investigate whether students with migration background have equal opportunities to accomplish their study in comparison with students without migration background. Our research question was: What are differences between medical students with and without migration background in (1) student intake, (2) study progress, (3) graduation numbers, at the preclinical and clinical part of their study. Methods Study intake and progress data of 7 cohorts (2014/2015-2021/2022) were received from the central office of the University of Amsterdam, following strict privacy and data management procedures. Students were informed in advance and 40 students choose to opt-out for the study, their data were removed. The rest of the data (N = 5188) were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results More students with migration background accessed the medical school, increasing from 10% to 25%. There were hardly no differences between students and their study progress (in ECTs) during their preclinical study, except during online education in the COVID-19 pandemic and during the introduction of a new curriculum. There were large differences between students in the clinical years, where – after 48 months – 87,9% of students without migration background had graduated versus 56,3% of students with migration background. Conclusions Institutional measures need to be taken to ensure that there are equal chances for students to excel in their study and complete it, especially during the clinical years and in times of educational transformations.