As the artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics industries grow, fueling a craze for engineering majors in China, the preference for medical schools and the medical profession is reportedly declining.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on September 20 that an increasing number of top-tier students in China are considering changing career paths after entering medical school, and admission cutoffs for medical programs are dropping.

This trend is analyzed to be driven by factors such as the extremely long time it takes to establish oneself as a stable physician in China, low wages during the training period, job shortages, and heavy workloads, including night shifts.

Huang Chaoyuan, a fifth-year clinical medicine student at a university in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region who was interviewed by SCMP, chose to enter medical school after seeing medical staff in action during the COVID-19 pandemic, but is now considering switching careers to the consulting industry.

Having gone through a 12-month unpaid internship in his final year, he said, "Due to cost-cutting and efficiency-boosting measures, both young and mid-level doctors are suffering from job shortages, low pay, and heavy workloads."

As science and engineering majors like AI rapidly emerge, the popularity of medical schools has been shown to be falling.

Citing local media that analyzed college admission score results in Zhejiang Province, SCMP reported that the lowest admission ranking for students admitted to the medical school of Sun Yat-sen University, a prestigious institution in Guangdong Province, dropped by 1,300 places compared to last year.

In the case of Southern Medical University, another medical school in Guangdong Province, the lowest admission ranking for applicants from Zhejiang Province dropped to below 2,000th place, and for applicants from Guangdong Province, it plummeted by more than 10,000 places.

Chinese universities have different recruitment quotas and admission cutoffs by region.

The drop in admission cutoffs was particularly pronounced in the five-year undergraduate clinical medicine programs.

Graduates of this program must undergo three years of residency training at a hospital, and competition to secure a residency position is fierce, making a master's degree or higher practically a basic requirement in recent years.

Following this entire career path takes a minimum of 11 years.

The compensation received while working clinical tasks similar to regular medical staff after difficultly entering the training program is low.

A 2020 survey by Chinese medical information platform DXY showed that about 28% of resident trainees received less than 1,000 yuan (approx. 200,000 won) per month, and 8% had no income at all.

The proportion of those receiving more than 3,000 yuan (approx. 580,000 won) per month was only 32%.

(Photo: Yonhap News)