I think, as others here have speculated, that the competitiveness at DO schools is rising because knowledge of the DO profession, especially among premedical students, is hitting a critical saturation. As I've alluded to on other threads on the subject, at my school there is a relatively large segment of matriculating students who really don't see it as an "alternative" way into medicine. They get irritated when this is implicated by other students. Commenters on SDN often fail to realize that many applicants to medical school have never been on SDN, let alone post or routinely read the content. SDN, for all its virtues, can be a little neurotic. So, I'll elaborate a bit:
1) Many students at my school seem to come from smaller private and public liberal arts colleges throughout what I call "middle America." Think rural Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, Kentucky, etc. Their school's premedical admissions offices promote DO schools among allopathic institutions as a completely equitable option, sometimes with their own positives. My DO school seems to go to great lengths to market and recruit in these places. There are highly competitive applicants at my school and, if I were to look at them through the lens of SDN standards, I would be perplexed, as if they got lost on their way to a "mid-tier" MD school. There are also the students from NY and California who, when faced with the increased odds of admission at their state MD schools, saw DO institutions as a totally reasonable pathway to becoming a physician.
2) DO is starting to get a reputation as the go-to pathway for primary care. Quite a few students in my class want to be family practice doctors out of the gate. It isn't lost on them that DO schools tend to push primary care as their mission and, for a small select few, that DO = OMT. Deep down, and I could be wrong, there is definitely an understanding that OMT= increased income in the right practice environment.
3) Financial. Some states have crazy expensive state medical schools. Some of the DO schools are cheaper, depending on in-state vs. OOS status.
There are a variety of other reasons that students choose the DO pathway, but they're more individual and harder to quantify into a single point. The bigger point is that DO schools, instead of being an alternative way to medicine for many students, are attracting students who truly see it as just another path to being a physician. I think many of the schools are doing this while simultaneously trying to balance the overall feel of their institutions, so it is still a good option for the non-traditional applicant. Above all else, DO schools are unique and they have their own unique set of things they're looking for in an applicant. I don't think anyone on here should be getting too worried about the admissions equation just yet.
