Student recruitment continues to be one of the most important ways that we can ensure the future viability and growth of podiatric medicine. From time to time there has been some confusion regarding what APMA, AACPM, and our colleges are trying to achieve through this recruitment initiative.
I want to make our intentions as clear as possible: We are NOT looking to increase the size of our graduating classes, even though the most recent workforce study conducted by the State University of New York at Albany projects a major shortage of podiatrists over the next two decades. Instead, it is our intent to increase the applicant pool by at least 400 percent in order to give our colleges the opportunity to select the highest-quality students.
Members of the Marketing and Career Development Committee gathered at APMA headquarters.
APMA’s Marketing and Career Development Committee met last week to brainstorm new strategies to more effectively reach potential qualified applicants to our colleges. We also need more members to become part of our mentor network. Mentors are a vital connection to local college and university pre-medical advisors. In addition, mentors can directly engage prospective students by allowing those students to shadow them in their practices.
To find out how to get involved in recruiting more qualified applicants to our colleges, please click here.
How can we honestly attempt to recruit the brightest of the bright, when we have a national shortage of quality residency programs. I see the same divisions remaining in the profession that were present over 50 years ago. Heiarchy dictated by board certification. We are podiatrists and should all have access to a minimal standard of training. 4 years of school, 3 years of residency in medicine, podiatry and foot / rearfoot surgery with additional fellowship following this training. After this minimal competency only then can we be on parity with allopathic physicians (even with our DPM degree). ONLY then can we recruit the best of the best.
With all due respect to Dr. Kurtzer’s point of view, how can we honestly strive to create the best postgraduate training opportunities (comprehensive 3+ year residencies and subspecialty fellowships), only to see these programs underachieve without the best and brightest graduating from colleges of podiatric medicine? Indeed, it is critical that every podiatric medical graduate have an opportunity to pursue residency. However, it is equally critical that we aggressively pursue the best candidates to fill them.
The balance lies in capping the number of matriculating students to the level of anticipated available residencies (which is understandibly NOT an easy task, considering residency numbers can change drastically over four years). I believe the most challenging aspect of this is to ensure that all colleges abide by such a cap, rather than taking advantage of the larger applicant pool to admit more students and collect more tuition. This will require tremendous amounts of cooperation and integrity.
Limiting the number of students, in order to match the number of available residencies, should never mean sacrificing the quality of the students who matriculate. This is all the more reason why we should be recruiting aggressively. Thank you to Dr. Gastwirth for highlighting this issue, even during a critical residency shortage.