Match List analysis - Part 3 of 3
TL;DR
So I would say overall for this year’s match list, in terms of the breadth of specialties matched into, as well as hospital program institutions, this year’s match list is probably at average for a small, lower-tier med school like UMKC, if not actually below average for this year, in comparison to our prior match years. I think there are several things at play here:
1 -- the residency match has gotten a lot tighter for medical graduates due to the ratio of the number of residency spots to the number of U.S. med school graduates, with new medical schools being added by the LCME in recent years, and thus more graduates that weren't there in previous match years. Thus, now medical school reputation, both in terms of academic prestige, and also being "known" entities, in terms of the quality of their medical graduates from personal experience by residency program directors, is a lot more important now than it used to be. Thus, the more lower-tier medical schools will be the first to feel the crunch, while top-tier med schools will be less hit hard or the last to feel it, if at all.
2 -- since UMKC's BA/MD class composition has changed a lot in terms of geography (Class of 2013 was the first class who had the regional category allocated, entering as Year 1s), a weakness in terms of matching into the more competitive specialties has started to surface, since the demand for them is higher (not surprising, since students from outside Missouri make up more of the class and pay more in tuition than in-staters, and thus are more likely to gravitate towards specialties in which income is higher to pay off their higher debt loads sooner, although income potential is not the sole driver of specialty selection). It was much different when the class was only 90% in-state, 10% out-of-state, in terms of the type of specialties the majority of students in the class were seriously considering and shooting for (Class of 2012 and earlier), although that's not a hard and fast rule.
You can compare these match lists for UMKC to those at Mizzou, SLU, and Wash U above, as well as Google medical schools’ match lists from your own home state as most med schools have posted them online. If you have any questions at all on the match list, the actual matching process, or anything I’ve said here, please feel free to ask.