A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

Scott thinks:
===============
More importantly, med schools are in competition with each other for
students, so
it's extremely unlikely that they would shoot their own feet just to
pander
to the AMA.
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Hmmm... are you sure they're in competition with each other?

Yup. Positive.

If I were
a university president, the last faculty I'd want to increase enrolment
in would be medicine. Just a quick google got me tuition figures for
med school in Arizona (albeit two conflicting figures: just under
$10,000 and just under $13,000 per year). I'll assume the figures are
comparable around the USA. Surely you're not going to claim that $9,000
covers the entire cost of a med student's education. There's going to
be a huge government subsidy that accompanies this $9,000.

Med Schools have to be a royal pain in the ass to university
administrators as they are incredibly capital intensive with constant
demands for upgrading. It's so much simpler/cheaper to pump up
admission into business schools where your major expenditures are
chalk-and-talk seminars.

So, Scott, I doubt very much that there's competition between
universities to get med school students.

They're just like any other business. How ever much of a pain med students
are, the university has a lot invested in the med school program, as you
yourself admit, and the only way to pay for all that infrastructure is to
have students in the programs. Any med school administrator who went to the
Regents with the argument "Med students are a pain in the butt, let's not
only not recruit them, let's deny them admission so we don't have to spend
any money educating them" would be fired.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
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© 2005 Scott Weiser