SLCC acquires $100k grant to study, target systematic racism using ‘holistic admissions’
Sep 18, 2024, 2:12 PM
FILE - Salt Lake Community College’s Meadowbrook campus in South Salt Lake is pictured on Friday, April 17, 2020. (Ivy Ceballo, Deseret News)
(Ivy Ceballo, Deseret News)
SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake Community College’s School of Health Sciences was one of five schools chosen across the U.S. to receive a $100,000 grant to study “holistic admissions,” the school said Wednesday.
Recently, the school moved to include holistic admissions in its process for new students, meaning the school doesn’t only consider the grades of applicants but includes factors like volunteer and leadership experiences.
“Holistic admissions help identify potential students who are not only academically strong but who also have important soft skills that are necessary in healthcare, such as responsive bedside manner, cultural competence, and the life experience to commit to a long career serving the communities that they come from,” the school said.
The grant, awarded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Systems for Action research program, aims to “rigorously” test new approaches that would demolish systematic racism within the admission process and the subsequent inequities patients face in the health care system.
More specifically, the school’s first goal is to test several holistic admission techniques in three of SLCC’s competitive health science programs and develop data on the findings. Second, it will evaluate the “intercultural competence” of the school’s nursing students in comparison to nurses who have been practicing for three or more years.
“We want to know if there’s a difference in how people identify culture and inequities in healthcare from the incoming student perspective and then from those who have been nursing for a while,” said admissions program manager Cher Knupp.
SLCC did not specify which three of its health programs would be selected for the study, but its programs include nursing, physical therapy, dental hygiene and respiratory therapy among others in eight campus locations.
“This grant will really allow us to expand all aspects of the holistic admissions process in three of our programs, including building out technology to support and expand holistic admissions.”
