US Medical School Finances

The 30th review of medical school finances is intended to reflect, through analysis of medical school revenues and expenditures, the secular trends in medical education in the United States.

The 30-year interval may be viewed as two distinct periods: from academic year 1958-1959 through academic year 1978-1979 and from academic year 1979-1980 through academic year 1988-1989, the latest full year for which data are available. The first period can be characterized by huge absolute and relative increases in all aspects of medical education. Some sense of the growth in the enterprise may be gained from an examination of a few of its dimensions shown in Table 1. The number of schools increased, the number of candidates for professional and academic doctorates doubled and tripled, respectively, and the population of postdoctoral students mushroomed. The number of full-time faculty almost quintupled. While these measures of medical school activity were increasing so substantially,