Med school applicants fall 22% since 1997

By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff, 9/3/2003

Applications to the nation's medical schools dropped for the sixth straight year in 2002, representing a fall of nearly 22 percent since 1997, the American Medical Association reports today.

Specialists blamed the decline on everything from potential medical students being discouraged by the enormous cost of medical school to declines in the status of doctors.

But there's early evidence suggesting the drop may already be rebounding. At Harvard Medical School, applications for the class of students who begin their studies this month rose, reversing steady declines since 1999. And that emerging recovery in applications, in turn, might shed light on the earlier drop.

"During the big dot-com years, there were plenty of options for people who wanted to do good, who had altruistic interests without having to do all the hard work of medical school," said Mohan Boodram, director of admissions and financial aid at Harvard Medical School. "Now that the economy has taken a turn south, there are fewer options that give you the opportunity to do well, to make a good living, and to have the kind of job security that physicians have."

The AMA study, detailed in The Journal of the American Medical Association, found that applications dropped from 43,016 in 1997 to 33,625 in 2002. Applications peaked in 1996, at 46,965.

But even with the steep drop, there were still far more applicants than slots in medical schools. The author of the study, Barbara Barzansky, the secretary of the AMA's Council on Medical Education, reported that in 2002 there were nearly two applicants for every medical school seat.

"It's never descended to the point that there are unfilled slots," Barzansky said. "And the average academic qualifications were not any lower than earlier years. So, in general for the public, it probably doesn't matter that applications to medical schools are declining."

Historically, Barzansky said, medical school applications have always ebbed and flowed, with a decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s followed by a dramatic rebound in the mid-1990s.

The latest drop is likely a reflection of undergraduates being scared away from medical school by the prospect of accumulating an average student loan debt of $104,000 upon graduation, said Dr. Lauren Oshman, president of the American Medical Student Association.

"There seems to be no cap on tuition increases, and the medical students are feeling it," said Oshman, a recent graduate of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "That's one reason students may not be choosing to go into medicine."

Another reason: a shift in the way physicians are viewed in the community.

"There was a time when those individuals were highly esteemed," Oshman said. "But with the advent of managed care and for-profit medicine, the role of the physician as primary decision maker and community leader may be compromised. I think undergraduate students see that."

Oshman also expressed concern that the decline is further reducing the pool of medical school candidates from communities of color. Only 6 percent of practicing physicians are African-American, Hispanic, or Native American, Oshman said, far lower than those groups' representation in the general population.

Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.