More students than ever want to study medicine in the UK next year, figures released by UCAS, the universities admissions service, suggest.
Over 21,300 people had applied by the October deadline, with numbers being boosted by a significant increase in applications from overseas.
There’s an increasing trend - 11.6% in 2010 - of people generally applying for higher education. The increase in UK applicants to medical school was lower than this at 10.9%.
Applications from overseas, however, eclipsed these figures. There was a 35.3% increase to 2,148 applications from people in EU countries (40.8% growth among European women wanting to do medicine in the UK). And a sizable 18.4% increase from non-EU countries.
UCAS acting chief executive Virginia Isaac said: “Medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine and science as well as places at Oxford and Cambridge are very competitive and this year is no different.
“Applicants to medicine are up 13.7 per cent with those from women, particularly from overseas and other EU countries, continuing to outstrip men.”
Meanwhile, the UK Foundation Programme Office has reported that all final year medical students are to be allocated a two year foundation programme.
They said there was a very close match between the number of eligible applications and the number of vacancies.
Tags: Medical students, Workforce
