Our December 2002 Inquiry with seventeen Medical School Admissions Deans demonstrated that all of the participating schools strongly supported a liberal arts education as an outstanding preparation for medical school. Many of the Deans considered medicine itself to be a true liberal art. (See The Advisor, March 2003:16-20 Ð Appendix X.) Nevertheless, few of the Deans were willing to assert that a liberal arts education was the best preparation for medical school. This is understandable since they must approach each applicant in an unbiased manner, even if they personally prefer a liberal arts education.
We wanted to move beyond the personal opinions of Admissions Deans to see if there was statistical evidence to support our hypothesis that a liberal arts education was an ideal preparation for medical education. Our first source was the Medical School Admissions Requirements book that is published every year by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and contains the yearly admissions statistics by undergraduate major. While the actual percentages might vary slightly from year to year, it is clear that students who major in non-science subjects consistently gain admission to medical school at a significantly higher rate or percentage than students who major in biological sciences. Non-science majors usually do at least as well as physical science majors, and, in some years, the non-science majors do slightly better in gaining admissions to medical school. We consider these results to be strong support for a liberal arts education.
Next we asked the AAMC to look at the statistics from the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS) to see how students fared in gaining admission to medical school based on the Carnegie classification of their undergraduate school. We found liberal arts colleges had the highest percentage of acceptances for each of the last five years by a small margin over research universities.
Although these results are encouraging, they are only crude measures of any sort of liberal arts effect since they are merely aggregate numbers without any other variables being taken into account. We wanted to see if we could isolate a liberal arts effect that would be separate from an individual student's grades or a college's selectivity. This sort of study would have been impossible in the past since the AMCAS database containing all of the information on each applicant to medical school did not allow for any sort of detailed analysis of an applicant's college curriculum. All of an applicant's courses and grades were combined into one of two categories: their biology, chemistry, physics, and math (BCPM) grades were combined to form a BCPM (science) average, and their remaining courses were combined to form an AO (all other) average.
However, for the class entering in 2002, the AMCAS application expanded the categories of academic disciplines into 20 separate fields (English, History, Philosophy, Foreign Languages, etc.). This change makes the database much richer and allows for a more detailed analysis of the sort of academic preparation that leads to medical school admission.
We have negotiated a data licensing agreement with the American Medical College Application Service giving us access to its entire database of applicants for the 2002 entering class (see Appendix X for proposal). We won't have access to data about individual schools, but we shall have the schools grouped together based on their selectivity so we can account for that variable. We shall be able to look at every applicant and accepted student and compare their major, their choice of electives, their grades in all courses, their MCAT test scores, their college's selectivity, etc. We should be able to determine if a student with a well-balanced curriculum (i.e., a liberal arts education) has any advantage in gaining admission to medical school. We anticipate looking at a variety of other questions that have not been possible to answer in the past.
We are excited about this opportunity to gain access to this database since, to our knowledge, no one has done such a detailed analysis of the applicants to medical school for a single year. Medical schools have traditionally stated that their ideal applicant is a well-rounded individual who had the broadest possible education. This study should allow us, as well as the medical schools, to determine if their stated preference is borne out in reality.
Once we have gathered and analyzed the results, we shall bring together a diverse group of people that includes some of the Academic Deans who were here in the fall, 2002, faculty from liberal arts colleges, admissions staff and others to review and critique our interpretation of the data. We shall work with a writer to develop articles that clearly explain the results to diverse audiences, including high school admissions councilors. We also shall publish the full technical report of our findings on the Center of Inquiry's web site.