6000 Seek Admission To Med School Here

Applications to Harvard Medical School have quadrupled in the last two years; almost 6000 applications will be filed this year for the 140 places in the class of 1976.

Applications filed last year by those seeking admission to the class of 1975 totaled 3150--2720 men and 430 women. That was almost double the figure of the year before.

Twenty-nine women--the largest number to enter the Medical School since it began admitting women in 1945--have registered in the class of 1975, along with 109 men.

Officials at the Med School and the Office of Graduate and Career Planning (OG&CP) said yesterday that there is no end in sight to the great rise in applications that has occurred at Harvard and at every other medical school in the United States during the last decade.

"It's going to get more and more difficult for the white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-male to get into medical schools," James W. Wickenden, associate director of the OG&CP said.

He pointed to Stanford Medical School, where the admissions committee is trying to achieve a 1:1 ratio of men and women accepted.

Wickenden also remarked that fewer medical schools with state aid are admitting out-of-state applicants, for fear that their public funds will be reduced.

Medicine's Appeal

Dr. Stephen J. Miller, director of Admissions at the Medical School, cited several reasons yesterday for the increasing popularity of medicine as a vocation. People are making career changes and more students look at medicine as an ideal way to serve humanity in an important field, according to Miller.

In addition, he said, physicians make a lot of money while remaining their own masters. As for Harvard's popularity, Miller said that "the name (Harvard) just isn't as formidable as it used to be and more people are willing to try an application."

People who would have considered careers in arts and sciences are turning to medicine, Wickenden added, "not because there is so much money in medicine, but so little in education and research. It's not the pot of gold that Ph.D's are striving for but the difficulty they have in getting any good job."

People who would have considered careers in arts and sciences are turning to medicine, Wickenden