Professional Service

Mission-Aligned Selection and Retention

Medical students walking through corridor at the university

Mission-aligned selection and retention (formerly Holistic Review) provides frameworks and resources for selecting and supporting learners with the academic and professional readiness to advance a program’s mission, contribute to biomedical research, serve evolving community and health system needs, and provide compassionate, accessible, high-quality patient care.

Mission-aligned selection uses a program’s mission to define merit and identify competencies, attributes, and experiences aligned with program goals and readiness. It emphasizes individualized review and a strategic, evidence-based approach that considers test scores, grades, experiences, and applicant context to identify applicants most likely to thrive and contribute to the mission.

Mission-aligned retention builds on selection by recognizing that admitted learners need systems designed to help them succeed. Holistic Student Support provides a foundation for retention by facilitating student thriving, ensuring professional readiness, and preparing a workforce to advance the program’s mission and respond to community health needs.

Mission-Aligned Selection Framework

The AAMC Mission-Aligned Selection Framework and its component parts provide a flexible scaffolding upon which programs can build a strategically sound selection process. It consists of a definition, four core principles, and the experiences-attributes-academic metrics-competencies model.

Definition

Mission-Aligned Selection is a flexible, evidence-informed approach to recruiting and assessing an individual’s competencies by considering their experiences, attributes, and academic metrics in order to select applicants who will best contribute to the program’s unique goals, learning environment, and the practice of medicine.

Core Principles

Selection criteria are aligned with the program’s curriculum, mission, community health needs, and the needs of the physician workforce. These criteria, including competencies and other characteristics, are assessed and supported by each applicant’s experiences, attributes, and academic metrics. Selection criteria are:
1. Clearly defined and transparently communicated to applicants and advisors as well as faculty, staff, and leadership.
2. Equitably applied and appropriately chosen for each stage of selection to create a highly qualified, mission-aligned candidate pool that reflects a broad spectrum of perspectives and experiences.
3. Defined, evaluated, and informed by performance data, educational expectations, and available support services to ensure success.
Programs consider the context of each applicant to understand how their unique educational opportunities, financial resources, communities, experiences, and motivations may contribute to the program and the practice of medicine.
Programs review interviewed applicants to select/rank a cohort of learners encompassing the complementary experiences, qualities, and characteristics needed to achieve their institutional and program mission and goals. To be clear, programs are prohibited by law from considering an applicant's race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, disability, or other legally protected characteristic in making selection decisions.
At the conclusion of each selection cycle, programs review, evaluate, and refine recruitment, screening, application review, interview, selection, and entry policies, processes, and practices, to ensure they are fair, effective, and valid.

Experiences-Attributes-Academic Metrics-Competencies Model

Watch the Experiences, Attributes, Academic Metrics, and Competencies (EAMC) Model video (4 minutes).

Video transcript (PDF)

Experiences, Attributes, Academic Metrics and Competency Model (EAMC) Graphic (PNG)

Resources for Admissions Officers

Mission-Aligned Considerations Resource for Admissions Officers

This resource will help admissions officers identify mission-aligned strategies they can implement across all phases of the admissions cycle. The strategies were developed in collaboration with innovators and leaders in medical school admissions. To make it easy to use, we've provided both a PDF and Word version of the checklist tool; the PDF includes additional contextual information.

There is No Admission Without Mission (Webinar)

This presentation is an excerpt from the 2023 AMCAS® Opening Cycle for Schools webinar held on June 14, 2023. This segment showcases two schools, the University of Kansas School of Medicine and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, that have actively identified their institutional mission and the health concerns of their community or region and aligned their admissions policies and criteria accordingly.

This presentation is an excerpt from the 2023 AMCAS Opening Cycle for Schools webinar held on June 14, 2023. (34 minutes)

There is No Admission without Mission transcript (PDF)

Mission-Aligned Retention

Mission-aligned retention builds on selection by recognizing that admitted learners need systems designed to help them succeed. As a foundation for effective retention, the Holistic Student Support Framework recognizes the interconnected aspects of a student's life and provides resources and interventions that support and promote students’ overall well-being and success in navigating medical school. Learn more about holistic student support below.

Holistic Student Support Webinar Series

This year's Holistic Student Support (HSS) webinar series turns to the core principles of the HSS Framework. Each session will dive into one principle—well-being for all, supportive learning environments, recognizing and supporting the needs of all students, continuous improvement, and lifelong learning—through actionable strategies, real-world examples, and cross-institutional dialogue.

Considerations for Holistic Student Support

This Considerations document serves as a launching pad for identifying holistic strategies you can implement across all the critical junctures at your institution. (Login required to access the Holistic Student Support virtual community.)

Holistic Student Support Virtual Community

The Holistic Student Support Community is a space for forward-thinking student affairs and medical education professionals to engage, collaborate, and share resources and strategies. To join the community, follow this link and search for “Holistic Student Support”.

Scholarly Publications About Mission-Aligned Selection and Retention

The following publications provide information about the effectiveness of mission-aligned selection and retention as well as promising practices in the field:

Introduction to the Advancing Mission-Aligned Principles Advisory Committee

The Advancing Mission-Aligned Principles Advisory Committee (AMAPAC) is charged with conceiving and producing innovations that advance mission-aligned principles and practices. The committee also makes recommendations, provides consultation, and/or provides feedback to AAMC staff responsible for initiatives and advocacy efforts related to mission-aligned selection and the application of mission-aligned principles.