Cornell's graduating class of 2001 followed career paths which did not include medical school last year, reflecting a nationwide trend of four straight years of declining interest in the field.
Applications to the nation's medical schools fell 3.7 percent in 2000, a percentage also mirrored among Cornell applicants. Exact numbers for University undergraduates were not available in time for publication.
Attractive jobs in dot-coms and information technology, along with the prospect of big medical school debts, may be among the reasons for the decline, said Barbara Barzansky, secretary of the American Medical Association's (AMA) medical education council and author of the study.
Add the increased paperwork, regulations and concerns that have come with managed care and, she said, ''it's not as friendly an environment as it used to be.''
Judy Jensvold, the senior associate director of health careers at Cornell and one of the advisors of pre-med undergraduates, agreed that applications to medical school may be tied to the economy.
"There will always be people who go to medical school no matter what," she said. "Then there are some people who say, maybe if I can get a terrific job, I won't go to medical school right away."
The decline appears to be leveling off; it was 6 percent in 1999.
Karin S. Ash, director of Career Services at Cornell, expects to see a turnaround in terms of the number of people applying to medical schools.
"When the economy goes down, everyone goes back to school," she said, noting that many students previously took of advantage of the opportunity to make quick money in the financial services sector. "It always goes in cycles."
In addition, she said, more high school students are applying to college than ever before which may also help boost applications to medical schools.
Jensvold, however, did not expect to see an instant spike because the economic downturn is still a relatively-recent occurrence. "These things aren't an immediate reaction. There's an echo effect," she said.
The applicant pool last year totaled 37,092. It included 17,274 women, a 0.9 percent drop from 1999, the report found. The number of minorities climbed 2 percent to 4,266.
At Cornell's Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical School in Manhattan, applications also fell to 6,344 in the fall of 2000, according to U.S. News and World Report. However, the acceptance was still a mere 3.5 percent for this year's class, which was made up of 101 students.
Officials at the medical school were not immediately available for comment.
Despite the drop in applicants, ''there are still more than twice as many applicants as there are places'' for them, said Dr. Jordan Cohen, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The recent decline in applications may, however, mean good news for pre-med undergraduates -- but only slightly.
In 1989, when applications to medical school were at their record lowest, the acceptance rate for Cornell students who desired to go to medical school was 90 percent. This number dropped to 55 percent in 1996 when applications were at their record high.
The current decline began in 1997, and in 1999, the Cornell acceptance rate was 70 percent.
Jensvold noted that although deans of medical school are always concerned about a drop in applications, she added, "It's a pretty soft drop; it's not a precipitous drop."
Considering the thousands of applicants who compete for about 100 seats at any medical school, a three percent drop isn't a cause for alarm, according to Ash.
"They turn away people with 4.0 GPAs," she said.
The AMA report, published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, also found that the number of patients available to participate in clinical teaching during 2000-01 decreased in almost half the nation's 125 medical schools.
Some experts say managed care is partly to blame. Insurance companies may be steering patients away from teaching hospitals because the care there can be more expensive, Barzansky said.
The shortage may help explain the results of two other new studies in the same journal that suggest that some medical schools may not be adequately preparing students to deal with common problems and procedures.
One study, by Massachusetts General Hospital researchers and based on a 1998 survey of 2,626 students completing their residency assignments nationwide, found that more than one in 10 felt unprepared to handle certain treatments and procedures. Medical school typically lasts four years, followed by three to seven years of residency.
Training in handling ''nontraditional patients'' such as those with AIDS, drug abuse and chronic pain was cited as particularly deficient.
''Teaching hospitals and medical schools need to provide residents with quality training that reflects the diversity of the patients they will one day treat,'' said Dr. David Blumenthal, the study author.
The other study found a serious inability to perform an abdominal exam among first-year residents in internal medicine and pediatrics at two New York medical institutions.
The study involved 148 graduates of U.S. medical schools and 35 from foreign schools and measured how many of 13 procedures each student performed in an exam on a young adult patient.
Well over half the foreign students did all the procedures, which included exposing the abdomen, inspecting it and squeezing it to feel the liver, kidneys and spleen. Fewer than 10 percent of the U.S. grads performed nine of the 13 procedures, according to researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Downstate Children's Medical Center.
Barzansky said her report found that 58 percent of the schools are undergoing major curriculum changes, with many trying to focus more on small-group learning and hands-on work in the community instead of traditional lectures.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Archived article by Beth Herskovits
By MARK DISTEFANO
If it weren’t for the immaculate visuals in The Assassin, the whole experience would be a snore. I’ve been often frustrated by the commonality of filmmakers’ grammar choices. For all the options available in cinema, many directors choose to frame in the same combination of shots — wide, over-the-shoulder, low angle — again and again and again. Hou Hsiao-hsien is not one of these directors. He creates painstakingly mounted studies in mood in which the form is related to the content inextricably. Hsiao-hsien is one of the few filmmakers who communicates at least 50 percent of his narratives through lighting and camerawork, as well as through writing and content.
COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL
That said, The Assassin is one of the most breathtaking films of the year, and yet it is quite soporific. The filming appears to have been conducted with the greatest attention to detail and yet with little attention to pace. I am not one to stand up and demand quick pace in a film, however, I suggest that an error might be made when things move so glacially that the viewers begin to get shut out of the proceedings. Thus, there is some kind of ambivalence I cannot shake off about Hsiao-hsien’s latest effort, winner of the Best Director Award at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. If I applaud it, I will be branded an art film snob, and if I quibble, I will be seen as too short-attention-spanned, or weaned on mainstream establishment fare. It’s a lose-lose proposition, but I must say, I’m on the fence about this one.
The story — although the audience is kept mostly in the dark about the ultimate narrative trajectory — takes place in ninth century China. The film stars Shu Qi as Yinniang, the assassin of the film’s title, carrying out swift and merciless deaths with knife and sword. The trouble is, her hand is occasionally stayed by her heart — by the sight of relatives of those whom she is hired to kill, which irks her master Jiaxin (Fang Yi-Sheu), who is also her mother figure. The relationship between the two recalls the emotional bond between Zhang Ziyi’s princess and Cheng Pei-pei’s Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This is particularly a compliment to Shu Qi, whose relentless, quiet steeliness and abrupt fierceness during fights carry the film. She may very well be the next Zhang Ziyi, who went on to become an international star. Anyhow, as punishment for staying her hand, Yinniang the assassin is sent to a distant province to kill military commander Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), her cousin whom she had once been set to marry. Many murky twists and turns ensue from there, and it takes index cards and constant note-taking to figure them out.
Chinese cinema is one of the most eclectic and diverse bodies of work in global cinema and contains some of the most invigorating New Wave pieces from directors such as Ang Lee (Taiwan, where Hsiao-hsien also hails from), Wong Kar-Wai, John Woo (both Hong Kong) and Zhang Yimou (mainland China). The Assassin takes place in a similar aesthetic as Kar-Wai’s martial arts epic from two years ago, The Grandmaster. The comparison is doubly valid, as that film was also one which left hardly an indelible impression on the mind in terms of plot, yet was intricately filmed and steeped in a gorgeous swath of rainbow colors.
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Hsiao-hsien’s film might be a reckless case of style over substance, but the critics disagree when it comes to the art films, especially if they are imports from abroad. The precedence of style over substance apparent in Assassin really is no different form what we see in many derivative pop entertainments critics love to deride, but hey, you never see a critic trashing a Cannes winner over, say, Spectre. Spectre has exactly the same problems, but it’s a whole lot more interesting, a whole lot more exciting and it’s easier to understand. This might be because it sets a lower bar for itself to clear, but nevertheless.
I have seen only one other work by Hsiao-hsien, and I could look up the details to refresh my memory, but I confess, I would rather not in order to make a more earnest impression of it. I enjoyed it and was absorbed in it while I watched it — it is a film from 2005 called Three Times — but here I am, hard-pressed to remember one detail about the cast. It was beautiful, exquisite even, as I experienced, but proved consummately forgettable in the long run. What I remember are visuals of striking beauty, interweaving storylines, intersecting coincidences and a deliberate pace. Sound familiar? The Assassin does the exact same.
Mark DiStefano is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at [email protected].