Med Schools Are Seeing A Surge Of Applications. It’s Called The ‘Fauci Effect’

When COVID-19 restrictions reduced his work schedule, Sam Smith turned to another time-consuming task: applying to medical school.

He’d always wanted to go into medicine, Smith said. But what was happening in the world had a big impact on the kind of medicine he hopes to practice. Now, Smith said, he wants to specialize in infectious diseases.

The experience of the last year “makes me think, there’s probably going to be another pandemic” in the future, said Smith, 25, who has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder and moved to Somerville, Massachusetts when his girlfriend started Harvard Law School. “So I want to be on the front lines of the next one.”

Even as college and university enrollment overall has dropped this fall, Smith is part of a wave of what officials say is an all-time record number of applicants to medical school.

The number of medical school applicants is up 18 percent this year over last year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, or AAMC, driven by the example of front-line medical workers and high-profile public health figures such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Renewed attention to inequities in the delivery of health care has also played a role.

“It’s unprecedented,” said Geoffrey Young, the AAMC’s senior director for student affairs and programs, who compares it to the response to another traumatic moment in American history: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

“After 9/11, there was a huge increase in the number of men and women that were entering into the military,” Young said. “So far in my lifetime, at least, and for as long as I’ve been in medical education, that’s the only comparison that I could make.”

The Stanford University School of Medicine reports a 50 percent jump in the number of applications it received this year over last year, or 11,000 applications for 90 seats. New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine says it’s seen a 4 percent increase, but that comes on top of a 47 percent rise last year after the medical school made tuition free; this year, it has more than 9,600 applications for 102 spots. The Boston University School of Medicine says applications are up 27 percent, to 12,024 for about 110 seats.

Read the rest of this story at GBH’s website.