Tracking: an answer to psychiatry's recruitment problem?

Part of psychiatry's recruitment problem stems from large-scale defections among students who were planning careers in psychiatry when they entered medical school. The authors present data indicating that University of Maryland freshmen who preferred psychiatry were more than four times as likely to enter psychiatric residency training if they participated in the Combined Accelerated Program in Psychiatry, a continuous 4-year medical school track, than if they pursued the regular undergraduate psychiatry program. The authors believe that an enthusiastic psychiatric faculty intimately involved with students over an extended period of time was the crucial factor neutralizing antipsychiatric socialization experiences in medical school.