A hat tip to David at Photon Courier for this story at Carpe Diem, comparing the supply and demand for lawyers and doctors.
In 1963, there were only 135 law schools in the U.S., so the increase to 200 today represents almost a 50% increase over the last 45 years in the number of U.S. law schools. Unfortunately, we’ve witnessed exactly the opposite trend in the number of medical schools. There are 129 medical schools in the U.S., which is less than the number of medical schools 100 years ago (166), even though the U.S. population has increased by 300%. Consider also that the number of medical students in the U.S. has remained constant at 67,000 for at least the period between 1994 and 2005, according to this report, and perhaps much longer. The number of applicants to medical school keeps going up, by almost 22% between 2003 (34,786) and 2007 (42,315), despite the fact that the number of students admitted has gone up by only about 7% (from 16,538 to 17,759) over that period.
Apparently law schools are responding to the demand by creating more supply, while medical schools aren’t. Mark Perry’s analysis continues…
If we had 129 law schools (instead of 200) and 200 medical schools in the U.S. (instead of 129), it would probably go a long way to solving our "health care crisis." More MDs at much lower salaries along with fewer lawyers and lawsuits would be a good thing, no?
Probably. Or as one person commented on his post,
Maybe we would have more medical schools if doctors could make a living suing lawyers for malpractice.
Touche!
Michael F. Martin says
Things are a little more complicated than the numbers you cite. While the number of law schools has increased, there is now a bimodal distribution is starting lawyer salaries, reflecting the expert service problem of quality control that consumers of legal services face — the big corporations are using the same group of grads from top law schools that they were 30 years go, even though there are more of those big corporations and they’re even bigger big corporations.
On the medical side, while the number of medical students hasn’t grown, the expert service problem has been solved through statistical analyses of the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment at many hospitals — i.e., the doctors incentives are now better aligned with their customers (the patients) than ever before. Moreover, there has been a big increase in physicians assistants and other paramedical professionals over the same period.
Matt says
Comparing the numbers of medical schools around 1900 to today is not meaningful. During the first quarter of the 20th century, medical schools underwent drastic accreditation requirements changes. One could look at this as an example of government regulation negatively impacting the health market, however, I’m quite happy that bloodletting is no longer a standard treatment for influenza–a treatment that could still be found taught in some medical school in 1900. See http://www.case.edu/artsci/wrss/documents/wrs2001-02ludmerer_002.pdf for a more proper overview of the last 100 years of medical education.