Interest in medical school is cooling noticeably in China, where artificial intelligence and robotics are expanding fast. As preference for science and engineering majors spreads, admission cutoffs for medical programs are falling and more enrolled students are switching career paths. Long training periods, low pay and heavy workloads are cited as the main reasons students are turning away from medicine.
Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported on the 21st that a growing number of high-achieving students in China are considering a change of direction even after entering medical school. The decline in admission cutoffs is most pronounced in five-year undergraduate clinical medicine programs. Analysts attribute the shift to the long road to establishing a career as a doctor, combined with low pay during training, difficulty finding jobs and heavy workloads that include night shifts.
Huang Chaoyuan, a fifth-year clinical medicine student at a university in China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, chose medical school after watching medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. With one semester left before graduation, they are now weighing a move into the consulting industry. During the 12-month unpaid internship in the final year, they spent most of their time on administrative work rather than gaining hands-on clinical experience, they said. SCMP reported that the risk of injury from medical disputes was another factor prompting a rethink.
As majors in fields such as AI rise sharply, preference for medical school continues to slide. Citing local media that analyzed admissions results in China's Zhejiang Province, SCMP reported that the lowest-ranked student admitted to the medical school at Sun Yat-sen University, a prestigious institution in Guangdong Province, placed 1,300 spots lower than a year earlier.
Chinese universities set enrollment quotas and admission cutoffs differently by region. Growing aspirations toward jobs tied to humanoid robots and AI are also seen as fueling the tilt toward science and engineering.
Graduates of the five-year clinical medicine program must complete three years of residency training at a hospital. As competition for those positions has intensified, a master's degree or higher has effectively become a basic requirement. Completing the path from medical school to the end of training takes at least 11 years.
Trainee doctors handle clinical duties similar to those of full-fledged medical staff but are paid relatively little. In a 2020 survey by the Chinese medical information platform DXY, about 28% of trainees were paid less than 1,000 yuan a month, and 8% received no income at all. Only 32% were paid more than 3,000 yuan a month.
The tilt toward science and engineering is not limited to medical schools. Local outlet Zhejiang Daily said students are increasingly avoiding medical programs because even medical graduates are finding it hard to land jobs, the course of study is long and the workload is demanding. The rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese generative AI model, is also cited as a factor driving interest in science and engineering. Applications to construction-related majors such as civil engineering, meanwhile, are falling along with those to humanities departments with uncertain job prospects, as the property market slump drags on.
