New U.S. Medical Schools to Open

Medical school applications are hitting an all-time high. 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. For several years many potential students have been attending offshore medical schools, or giving up hope entirely, when they could not get into domestic schools.

The United States has recently opened, or has impending openings, of nearly two dozen medical schools, the most at any time since the 1960's and 1970's. These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter century. 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. 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.)

Read the full article in the New York Times, or click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/education/15medschools.html?ref=health