Then it'll be like 48 after first semester...then it'll be like 32 and then a couple comes back...I'm predicting 28 at the end of 2027....
we did have one person drop out after the first round of exams
This sounds rough, but it will actually be the best thing for the schools and for the students to have some attrition at each podiatry school with the upcoming residency crunch.
Hopefully the schools that toddle along ppl who fail pt1 boards, fail classes, etc have the sense to just dismiss most of them from the program. It'll only compound those students' suffering and their debt - and make the schools look bad - if they send those people along and into match... or put them onto remedial 5 year program, 6 year program, whatever.
AACPM says "First year enrollment totals range from 500-600 per year" on their website.
That is obviously not true when there were 558
grads into match last year and even more in prior recent years.
In reality, podiatry accepts students up to the perceived limit - and beyond it if they get enough applicant. That theoretical limit is the number of approved residency spots (many of them low quality spots, NYC spots, VA spots, etc). They bank - quite literally - on some student attrition happening.
Assuming average of 60 students in c/o 2027 at each of the now eleven podiatry schools (some pod schools obviously have far more, and newer schools have less), that's around 660 students. There are around 600 current approved DPM residency spots (supposedly... yet people who scramble always seem to say many listed as approved spots are not taking a resident). It will not be pretty in 2027 if there is not significant attrition. It will get worse and worse after that when schools look to expand class sizes... just like when Western Univ pod school opened, and we saw residency shortage for years afterwards.
Podiatry has never had two schools open in the same year until 2023.
They've never in 100+ years opened 4 new schools in a 20 year span, as they did now 2004, 2009, 2023 (x2).
The odds are longer than ever with more schools, the tuition is higher than ever, but
doing VERY WELL in school is still the best plan. Ignore the students who may or may not disappear from other seats, quit keeping score, ignore the APMSA and APMA rainbows and fluff, and just stay up on the course materials, do the reading... smash the exams. Have a bit of fun after term exams, then do it again and again.
Realize early and often that podiatry residencies are highly variable in quality. It's going to get harder and harder to get one of the roughly 100 or so quality podiatry residency spots - or one of the additional 100-200 good spots.... and some of those programs will likely get pressure to become diluted and add spots - or lose attendings to the fellowship nonsense.
Good podiatry jobs... ???? ROI of podiatry... ??? That's anyone's guess. Return starts with R and ends with N.