Preparing for exclusion: The hidden curriculum of success in medical student guidebooks

Despite decades of diversification efforts, U.S. medical school matriculants remain predominantly white, wealthy, and able-bodied, with fewer than 25% from under-represented minority backgrounds. While medical school application guidebooks claim to democratize access by demystifying the competitive admissions process, our content analysis of 38 such guides reveals how they paradoxically reinforce existing barriers to entry. Our examination shows how these guidebooks, in making admissions processes more transparent and explicit, simultaneously transmit subtle and implicit forms of professional gatekeeping that define who belongs—and importantly, who doesn't belong—in medicine. Specifically, we find that the guidebooks, which were designed to initiate “naïve” non-professionals into the profession's expectations, collectively described the ideal applicant and physician as someone implicitly wealthy, white, male, and able-bodied. Through both their inclusions and omissions, the guidebooks illuminated the “right” reasons for entering medicine and who was well-suited for, and worthy of, the profession, thereby delineating who belonged and who did not. This investigation makes two key contributions to medical education literature: it demonstrates how guidebooks function as tools of early professional socialization, establishing a hidden curriculum before formal training begins, and shows how this curriculum perpetuates external social closure, complementing research on discriminatory norms and internal social closure in medicine. We conclude with a call for the critical re-evaluation of pre-professional messaging to achieve better inclusivity in medicine.