Central Michigan University’s College of Medicine saw a large increase in their applications this past year.
As the admissions’ team sift through 7,432 applications, they are looking for ideal students to fill 104 spots. The number of applications fell short of record-breaking by about 10 according to admission officials.
Chris Austin, Director of Admissions at the College of Medicine said they saw a 15% increase in applications for the 2021 fall semester.
“We’ve seen bigger jumps in our short history and alot of that is because we’ve seen a lot of different milestones over the early years: getting full accreditation, graduating our first class etc., those all led to increased numbers in applications,” he said.
Austin said he wasn’t surprised by the recent jump in applicants as they’ve had increases almost every year since opening in 2013.
This increase in medical school applicants seen all over the nation was labeled as the ‘Fauci effect’. Austin said that may have contributed to CMU’s increase to some degree, but there are other factors.
“Ultimately the pandemic probably has altered people's behaviors in several ways which has culminated into this larger increase in applicants,” Austin said. “As an example you have situations where the pandemic has probably motivated a lot of people to maybe go into medicine who maybe weren’t fully committed to it before.”
Austin said they’re highest application year was 2019.
Per CMU’s cycle, medical school applications open every fall for the succeeding academic year. Because of this, students applying for the 2022 year may suffer from pandemic related obstacles.
Austin said last year’s applicants were minimally affected by the pandemic.
“They really only had about 2 months of not being able to maybe complete more clinical work or research etc so they weren’t as impacted as definitely the students that will be applying this June have been,” he said.
