If you have your heart set on medicine as your calling in life, getting into medical school isn't that much of a cut-and-dried affair anymore, even for hard-working pupils. If, like my friend, Michael Friedman, a recent graduate from a small university in Virginia, you were to try to apply to 25 established medical schools and check your mail every day, for weeks, like him, you'd probably see what the state of affairs in medical education is in America now. He actually did get in; but not at any of those 25 med schools he tried first. He got into a school that was as new to medical teaching as my friend was to medical learning. It was a brand new medical school, one of the many, and it was in Pennsylvania.
America hasn't had that many new medical school inaugurations since the 70s. There are no more than 130 established medical schools in the entire country. In fact, there has been only one new medical school established in 20 years. And they go on and open 200 law schools - no wonder there are so many lawyers around, and how people hate them. But the situation is finally being addressed. About 25 new medical schools have either opened or are in the process of it, all over the country in this past year. It is the strangest thing. American hospitals are so short on American-educated medical graduates, that they are hiring from overseas, Asia, Europe and so on. American high schools produce some of the best candidates for a career in medicine, and they apply in droves to every domestic medical school. But since there are not that many in the country, large numbers get turned down, and apply to foreign universities, and leave forever. New medical universities like the Hofstra University School of Medicine in New York, are part of the efforts to rectify the imbalance.
They couldn't have put this off any longer. A large swath of aging doctors are set to retire pretty soon; and a large section of the population is quickly growing old, and needs a lot more medical care now. And whatever the new health-care reform promises, there surely are going to be millions more people entering the health insurance system. There simply have to be more doctors in the system. If all the newly proposed schools come online soon, that would be an increase in medical school training capacity in the country that is a fifth more. There is the Quinnipac University in Connecticut, the Rowan University in New Jersey - and many others in addition.
Some people rejoice at this; this promises much less waiting for your turn at the doctor's; but skeptics feel that the new doctors will just try to all set up shop in the big cities, and leave the little towns underserved. In general, new medical colleges are coming up in places that locally experience a great deal of physician shortages. There will be about 4000 new MDs entering service over the next decade. That should help with the way America imports upwards of 5000 doctors from other countries every year.
This could make things easier for the way hospital visits turn out. In general, locally trained doctors have a better take on symptoms they see in local patients - if those symptoms are the kind they grew up with themselves.