After Years of Quiet, Expecting a Boom in U.S. Medical Schools - NYTimes.comPeter Allen applied to 30
medical schools after graduating from the
University of Pittsburgh last year. Twenty-eight said no.
Of the two that said yes, one had something in common with Mr. Allen: It, too, was starting out in medicine. He enrolled in the inaugural class of The Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pa.
“I was ecstatic that I had been accepted to a medical school,” Mr. Allen said, adding that he would have gone for a master’s in bioengineering if he had not been accepted. “It’s a giant sigh of relief; it secures your plans for the rest of your life really.”
The Commonwealth is one of nearly two dozen medical schools that have recently opened or might open across the country, the most at any time since the 1960s and ’70s.
These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter century. Many bright students were fleeing to offshore medical schools, or giving up hope entirely, when they could not get into domestic schools. Meanwhile, American hospitals were using foreign-trained and foreign-born physicians to fill medical residencies. During the 1980s and ’90s only one new medical school was established.
“Huge numbers of qualified American kids were not getting into American medical schools or going abroad to study,” Dr. Lawrence G. Smith, dean of the proposed Hofstra University School of Medicine, in Hempstead, N.Y., which is not yet recruiting students, said last week. “I think it was a kind of wake-up call.”
The proliferation of new schools is also a market response to a rare convergence of forces: a growing population; the aging of the health-conscious baby-boom generation; the impending retirement of, by some counts, as many as a third of current doctors; and the expectation that, the present political climate notwithstanding, changes in health care policy will eventually bring a tide of newly insured patients into the American health care system.
If all the schools being proposed actually opened, they would amount to an 18 percent increase in the 131 medical schools across the country. (By comparison, there are 200 law schools approved by the
American Bar Association.) ....
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“I think we have to crank out different kinds of doctors,” said Dr. Olds, who started his new job Feb. 1.
Whether the demand for new medical schools exists among patients, it clearly exists among prospective doctors.
Dr. Olds said that at his former job as chairman of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, 25 percent of the students came from California. “So obviously there’s a ton of California kids trying to get into medical school traveling a long way.”
The Association of American Medical Colleges, a trade group, has called for a 30 percent increase in enrollment, or about 5,000 more doctors a year. The association’s Center for Workforce Studies estimates that 3,500 more M.D.s will enter graduate training over the next 10 years, roughly half of the 7,000 international medical school graduates now entering medical residencies in the United States every year, according to Edward Salsberg, director of the center.
At Quinnipiac, the trustees last month approved plans for a new medical school, to open in 2013 or 2014, if it passes accreditation. John L. Lahey, the university president, said that the proposed school would build on the university’s existing health sciences programs, and the hope was to recruit at least some students who had worked in health care and wanted to become doctors.
“We certainly think they will be what we tend to call nontraditional students, older, some minority,” Dr. Lahey said. ...
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Given the pent-up demand, Dr. D’Alessandri said, he was not worried that he might produce too many doctors for the good of society. “We should worry about too many lawyers,” he said dryly.
