Congratulations to your son!! Glad your son has a few options in front of him from which to choose from. Always comforting to be in that position.
So your first question addresses attrition (dropping out of the BA/MD program entirely, whenever that happens, whether it’s during the first 2 years or the last 4 years) and your second question addresses extension (going longer than the 6 years, usually 7 or 8 years, but still graduating with the MD degree). It’s not at all uncommon for some students to do both, first extension, and then eventually attrition, and there are plenty of students, of course, who extend, match into residency, and graduate.
Just as an FYI, graduating with the MD degree is separate from going through the match process and obtaining a residency. I know you probably know that but didn’t want people to conflate the two, although you obviously have to have graduated from medical school before starting residency in July.
UMKC is one of the only medical schools in which the entire entering class is a BA/MD class that comes in after high school. Probably different than your son’s other Bachelor/MD options in which that particular BA/MD class graduates from college first, however many years they have specifically allocated for that, and then joins and officially becomes part of the 4-year traditional medical school class, that has gone thru the AMCAS application. At UMKC, MD-only students that come in after finishing a Bachelor’s degree, are usually only brought in to make up for any attrition that has taken place, and thus can only enter at the spring Year 2 level, in order to bring the total class # back up to the original number.
This is what we have right now in terms of public data:
http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2007/04000/The_University_of_Missouri_Kansas_City_School_of.10.aspx (Click on “Article as PDF (75 KB)” on the right hand side and it should immediately pop up for you as a PDF since it’s free) - 2007[ul]
[]“As might be expected, the attrition rate in this school is higher than those of traditional four-year medical schools. Of all 3,377 students admitted at year one from 1970 through 2005, 20.6% left the program without the MD degree. However, attrition in years three through six is lower; only 161 out of the 3,377 admitted students (4.8%) withdrew or were dismissed during the last four years of the curriculum.”[/ul]
http://www.umkc.edu/provost/student-retention/retreat/som.ppt - 2009[ul]
[li]“The overall attrition rate is 21% (1970-2009); 15% when you eliminate Year 1 and 2 students.”[/li][]“Year 3-6 attrition is 6-8%”[/ul]
https://www.aamc.org/download/102346/data/aibvol7no2.pdf – for traditional 4 year medical schools - 2007[ul]
[li]“With a 10-year attrition rate at less than four percent,”[/ul][/li]https://www.aamc.org/download/379220/data/may2014aib-graduationratesandattritionfactorsforusmedschools.pdf - 2014
In terms of the percentage of people who extend in the program, period, or the percentage of people who extend in the program and then graduate and/or move on to residency, we don’t have publicly released stats on those numbers, although as discussed previously, there are various reasons students do so, academic difficulty/failure (i.e. inability to meet the required Science GPA), personal/family issues, taking a year off to do research for a particular specialty, etc.