Recruiting and selecting generalist-oriented students at New York Medical College

This paper describes the strategies developed for student recruitment and selection at New York Medical College (NYMC), a private medical school with a consortium of 22 teaching hospitals, to meet its goal of 50% of graduating medical students entering generalist careers. With funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Generalist Physician Initiative, NYMC developed strategies to attract applicants interested in primary care and to select primary care applicants for matriculation. These strategies included use of recruiting newsletters to describe the primary care curriculum, on-campus open houses for undergraduates, visits to regional undergraduate schools by generalist faculty, changes in the admission committee to include more generalists, and changes in the interview format to stress nonacademic qualities in applicants. The authors present data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Pre-Medical Student Questionnaire and from the AAMC Medical School Matriculation Questionnaire that indicate NYMC achieved its objectives. They warn, however, that it is unclear whether these changes occurred solely as a result of NYMC's strategies, as a result of market forces driving career choices, or as a result of some combination of these factors.