I second this! Average GPA and MCAT scores do tend to be lower than MD/DO schools, but that is for a wide variety of reasons. First of all, there are only 9 (soon to be 10) podiatric medical schools across the nation, whereas there are about 155 MD schools and 36 DO schools across the nation. Because the field of podiatric medicine is smaller, not a lot of people know about it compared to MD/DO schools. Podiatric medicine is also a pre-chosen specialty. Just as MDs and DOs can choose to specialize in OBGYN, Endocrinology, Urology, etc., DPMs have chosen to specialize in Podiatry from the start. This means that, of course, there are going to be less people applying to podiatric medical schools. To put this into more perspective, there are about 113,000 family medicine/general practice physicians, 12,000 dermatologists, 42,000 emergency medicine physicians, 14,000 gastroenterologists, 38,000 psychiatrists, and 18,000 podiatrists in the U.S. Every specialty has varying numbers of active physicians. In terms of the curriculum, as a WesternU podiatric medical student, I can confirm that we do take the same courses as the DO students here. In fact, it feels like 90% of the curriculum is shared between the DPM and DO students. I am pretty sure the DPM students at Scholl take classes with the MD students.