Interesting Statistics on Missouri Medical School Admissions

The recent article on the medical school at the University of Missouri-Columbia possibly losing its accreditation, made me curious of the demographics of the current medical students at the four medical schools within the state, and also prospective undergraduates who may be applying to the schools. Some quick Google searches led me to a bunch of interesting tables at the Association of American Medical Colleges which shed some light to the diversity of medical students in Missouri.

The first thing I noticed on the AAMC site was some tables of the racial breakdown of students from various undergraduate programs who apply to medical colleges. In Missouri, there is only one undergrad program that produces 15 or more African-American graduates that apply to med school, Washington University with 20. There are, in fact, only three undergrad programs in Missouri that produce more than 100 Caucasian-American med school applicants. Below I have a table I compiled of medical school applicants from Missouri universities that I could find in the AAMC data:

School	White	Asian	Black	Hispanic	Total	%White	%Asian	%Black	%Hispanic
WUSTL	168	163	20	13	379	44.33%	43.01%	5.28%	3.43%
SLU	107	61	< 15	< 10	189	56.61%	32.28%	NA	NA
Mizzou	111	< 50	< 15	< 10	147	75.51%	NA	NA	NA

These three universities produce 715 undergraduates who applied to medical school (US citizens and permanent residents only.) It would have been nice if they had a more complete list of data, but this is all I could compile from the site. However, just looking at these three schools which produce the most medical school applicants in the state, it is obvious to see the problems with trying to create a racially diverse student body at local medical schools. The body of students applying to medical schools simply is not very racially diverse! If almost all of the medical school applicants are white and Asian, it will be difficult for the schools to create a diverse incoming class.

The AAMC site also included the actual number of applications and matriculated students for the four Missouri medical schools:

School	Applicants	%InState	MO App.	Matriculated	%InState	MO Matr.
UMColumbia	1977	27.9	552	104	76	79
UMKC	1902	12.1	230	106	58.5	62
SLU	8518	5.5	468	181	16	29
WUSTL	4186	4.8	201	145	8.1	12

This is interesting in showing that although WUSTL and SLU are the two larger medical schools in the state, almost all of their students are not residents of Missouri. Whereas 60% to 80% of the med students at the two Missouri medical campuses are state residents (over 140 between the two campuses), only about 40 Missouri residents are enrolled at the SLU and WUSTL medical schools, with the other 280 students coming from other states.

So what would happen if the Columbia campus were to lose accreditation? That means the primary medical school in Missouri that produces physicians from in-state residents would not be accredited. Those in-state residents would most likely choose to go to medical school somewhere else. I am not sure if the UMKC campus is included in the accreditation, but that would at least mean 80 medical students studying out of state since WUSTL and SLU could not enroll them all. I cannot see that being a good thing for Missouri.