Number Crunching

Last year was a bloodbath for the match. OUCH. I downloaded the plastic surgery match report from may 2003 and did a little number crunching to figure out why and to find a few interesting facts. The report details statistics from 1992 to 2003. Here are some interesting statistics:

During that time period, the number of applicants decreased from 92 to 01, but skyrocketed from 01 - 04. From 01 to 04, the number of applicants shot up by 36%, while the number of spots remained relatively the same (from 103 to 100). The biggest increase in applications was between 03 and 04. There were 23% more applications in 04 than there were in 03! I called the CAS about a month ago and there were so far only a little over 200 applications for this year. Obviously that is not the final number as there will be a bunch of stragglers. I hope the number stays 250 or under. I hope all of my fellow residents were scared off by seeing their seniors gnashing their teeth and tearing their clothes last May. But if the trend continues, it could be an aweful match. If there was as big of an increase in applicants this year as there was last year, the number of paid applicants could be as high as 366!

Now just because there are 366 applicants doesn't mean that every single one of them will submit a rank list. From 92 to 04 and average of 25% of paid applicants didn't submit rank lists. So if that were the case, you could expect about 274 of the 366 theoretical applicants to submit rank lists.

One other point, just because 274 people submit rank lists doesn't mean that 274 will be in the match. From 92 to 04 an average of 6% of people who submitted rank lists withdrew before the actual match. So if 6% of those 274 people withdraw before the actual match, that would leave 258 people in the match.

Now this gets us to the number that we really care about - what percentage of people who are in the match will match? What is the magic number. Well assuming that the number of spots offered doesn't change and stays constant at 100, it could be ugly. The theoretical match rate for this year, assuming all of the recent trends hold would be no greater than 38%. YIKES!

A couple of other interesting things happened during the last couple years. The statistics break down the people who matched into whether they had <5 years of general surgery vs. all 5 years or more. In 01 the number of spots taken by people with 5 or more years of GS was 73%. In 02 that number was 88%. In 03 that number was 82% in 04 that number was 85%. Contrast that with the average percentage over the last 12 years of 70%! Clearly programs are starting to prefer applicants with 5 or more years of GS. You can almost forget about ditching your GS residency after 3 years now.

Now lets look at my best case scenario - only 250 applicants. If that were true and 25% of those people didn't submit rank lists (as is usual) then 189 people would submit rank lists. If it holds true that 6% of people who submit rank lists withdraw before match day, then there would be 178 people in the match. My best case scenario match rate would be 56%. Thats still ugly. If I were to put odds on the actual number for this year it would be somewhere between a 38 and 56% match rate.

One last interesting statistic. Since 1992, the number of people submitting rank lists has never matched the number of people ranked by programs. On average 9% of people who submit rank lists aren't even ranked by a SINGLE PROGRAM.