A Description of Medical College Environments.

The article presents a study which aims to extend the description of college environments to include institutions for professional education in the U.S. and Canada. In a population of 100 medical schools, 28 characteristics were intercorrelated, and a principal component analysis was carried out. Four components were rotated to a final solution by the Varimax procedure and given titles such as Affluence, Canadian versus U.S. Admissions Policies, Size, and Emphasis on Hospital Training. For the 52 U.S. medical schools that are in the same location as their parent university, correlations were computed between medical school scores on the factors and university characteristics. It is noted that the size and affluence of medical schools seem to reflect characteristics of the parent university. Size is most related to quality of graduate education. The four rotated factors appear to provide a brief but fairly representative profile of medical school characteristics.