I also think there are just SOOO many CA applicants. CA is THE most populated state in the entire country, over 37 million people (with a significantly higher medical-school applying aged population than most other states) that's almost 12% of the U.S. population (~308 million). With only 8 schools they simply just have too many applicants and they are also very popular with OOS applicants. They probably have one of the largest pools of applicants and therefore can choose the very best the country has to offer.
California had 4,972 applicants out of 42,742 total MD applicants, including foreign applicants (meaning CA residents represented 11.6% of all applicants)
2,154 California residents matriculated into SOME US MD school. 18,665 people matriculated into US MD schools. That means 11.5% of the matriculants into US MD schools were CA residents. This number goes against the claim that California residents were discriminated against in the overall medical admissions process, since a 0.1% difference between national and CA resident matriculation percentage is not statistically significant.
Out of those 2,154 CA residents who matriculated somewhere, 856 of them were able to stay in CA.
There are a total of 1,100 MD seats in CA. Once again, there were a total of 18,665 available seats (assuming that the number of matriculants is the same as available seats). 5.9% of the available seats in the country are in CA. This number supports the claim that CA is vastly undersupported in terms of available seats when compared with the percent of applicants coming from the state (11.6%).
By way of comparison to the IS-friendly state of Texas, they have 1,448 available seats (7.8% of the nationwide seats) but they have 3,427 applicants (8.0% of the nationwide applicants). This shows that the numbers are skewed toward having a lower % of available seats than % of applicants in a state due to some states not having a medical school. Those states contribute a number of applicants to the pool without contributing any seats to the stats.
As far as CA being OOS-friendly or not, since there were 856 CA residents who stayed in CA for med school out of 1,100 seats, that means 77.8% of the CA medical schools spots went to CA residents. It's up to you to decide if that is OOS friendly or not. Of course, the UC schools are much less OOS friendly than the privates.
Here are the take-home messages:
1. CA applicants don't appear to be disadvantaged in the overall "admissions game", as long as they are willing to leave the state.
2. CA does not contribute enough seats to the overall US MD pool, forcing us
😎 Californians to apply and matriculate elsewhere.
All of these stats are the latest available from AMCAS (using 2010 year) from the AMCAS Facts page
https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/
