But what you've pointed out....fewer women, all science majors etc doesn't say anything about entrance to get into med school. It may mean med school won't accept variations in its population, but as long as you qualify in the racial/gender sense, it seems a sure bet.
Many people find it hard to get into med school today because the process is random and requires high GPA and the hurdle of a good MCAT score. Ok, so there's many 'off ramps', I'll grant you that since the carribean schools didn't take off until the late 70's and DOs were still heavily stigmatized, but if the MCAT was something akin to the SAT where one could study for a couple of weekends and get a score good enough to get in, that implies that the 'lower number of seats' did not affect the academic competitiveness of medical school.
If all it took to be a doctor who made a ton of money and had all this respect was to be a science major and spend a couple of weekends on the MCAT, then it seems easier to get into med school then than it is NOW. Unless it was freakin' hard to do well in your science classes back then. But I wonder....nowadays we have so many people reapplying that there's a whole industry growing around reapplicants (SMP masters, linkages, carribeans etc), and no one would ever suggest 'winging' it on the MCAT to get into med school as it is implied that some people used to do for the MCAT way back then. Hence, I have to think that unless colleges were much harder back then for the bio majors, then med school may have been less competitive decades ago.
