Mecklenburg County commissioners chair Mark Jerrell said he is confident that Atrium Health will share data with him on the racial and ethnic makeup of the first class on the Wake Forest University School of Medicine’s Charlotte campus — but he doesn’t have the numbers yet and doesn’t know if they will be made public.
When hospital leaders announced the new school in 2021, they said they wanted the class to be “one of the most diverse learner bodies in the country.” But as The Charlotte Ledger/NC Health News previously reported, the city’s first four-year medical school has so far declined to release the data, despite a request from Jerrell.
Jerrell, who was quoted saying he would have a problem if Atrium withheld the data, said he subsequently had a long conversation with a top Atrium Health executive.
“They wanted to make sure that I got their perspective,” Jerrell said about his conversation with the Atrium executive, whom he did not name. “And I’m not speaking for Atrium, but it is very reasonable in my mind that if you put out that data in this political climate, to be concerned that the administration will challenge that.”
Over the past year, institutions nationwide have faced public backlash related to their diversity efforts amid heightened national scrutiny and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning race-conscious admissions. The number of medical students from underrepresented groups has dropped significantly, even as some data show better outcomes in underrepresented patient populations when their physicians come from a similar background.
Atrium Health did not respond to a request Tuesday asking about the ethnic and racial backgrounds of its first class. Previously, the hospital shared only geographic data when asked for demographic details.
Transparency at ECU
The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University recently updated a matriculants dashboard that includes demographic data about its first-year class, a spokesman said.
The dashboard shows that 10 percent of its incoming class of 91 students self-reported as Black or African American, and 7 percent self-reported as Hispanic. All of the incoming students are residents of North Carolina, and seven are first-generation college students.
In 2024, ECU boasted one of the highest rates of Black medical students among non-HBCU schools, according to a U.S. News & World Report analysis.
Alan Wolf, a spokesman for the UNC School of Medicine, previously said that the school would release the ethnic and racial data of its first-year class once they matriculated. On Tuesday, he said the information would not be available until September because the medical school relies on the main campus census, which includes undergraduates, for its demographics.
Diversity stats disappear
The Duke University School of Medicine also did not provide data in time for publication. “We’ll see what we can do,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email.
A 2025 class profile page lists only the number of applicants, interviewees and matriculants. An archived version of the page from November 2024 shows it included the percentage of students from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine.
The Wake Forest School of Medicine also previously included that category on its class profile page, according to an archived version of the site. It has since been removed.
A look at several medical school websites nationwide shows that many have yet to post 2025 class demographics. The medical schools at Harvard and Johns Hopkins still list the percentage of incoming students from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine on their 2024 class profile sites. Other schools, such as Emory and the Medical University of South Carolina, don’t include that data.
Other Charlotte elected officials expect to see data
The new campus of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine is Charlotte’s first four-year medical school. Operated by Atrium Health in partnership with Wake Forest, it opened in July with an inaugural class of 49 students.
In 2021, city and county leaders in Charlotte approved $75 million in public funding for the $1.5 billion medical innovation district where the medical school is located.
In addition to Jarrell, three other county commissioners — Arthur Griffin, Laura Meier and George Dunlap — told the Ledger/NC Health News they expect Atrium to release data about the school’s demographics, especially given the public investment.
Jerrell said he planned to ask Atrium about the data again this week. He said he didn’t know if Atrium would share the data publicly: “That’s a good question. That will be step two that I have to solve. I know we’ll have conversations about the public being able to have that information.”
At a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority board meeting on Tuesday, Atrium Health reported $6.9 billion in net operating revenue for the first half of 2025. Its net income for the period — which some would call profit — was $426 million.
(The hospital authority operates as Atrium Health, which is the division of Advocate Health that does business in the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama.)
Felicia Hall Allen, one of two hospital authority board members who voted against a recent change that scrubbed DEI language from the board’s bylaws, told the Ledger/NC Health News on Monday that she didn’t have any information about whether Atrium would release additional demographic data.
She said Advocate Health CEO Gene Woods has honored his commitments in the past.
“What I will tell you is that I trust that Gene Woods stands by his words,” she said. “I have never known him not to, and so I trust his intentions, and he always does the right thing.”
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