Capping the number of graduating students in medical schools while raising the admission quota by 30 percent at the same time in the 1980s has emerged as an empirical model for the government to argue that doubling medical school admissions would not be problematic.

This misconception and bias stem from a lack of understanding of medical education. The graduation quota system was introduced in the Fifth Republic of Korea in the early 1980s. During this period, universities increased admission quotas by 30 percent but capped graduation quotas to prevent students from graduating if they participated in demonstrations.

President Yoon Suk Yeol assured that increasing the number of medical school students by 2,000 would not deteriorate the quality of medical education. He noted that those educated 40 years ago, when the number of students at Seoul National University (SNU) College of Medicine doubled, were the ones who developed K-medicine into a world-class system.

President Yoon seemed unaware of a key fact, however. When the graduation quota system was first implemented in 1981, it applied to all majors. In August 1983, the rules for medical departments were revised, allowing them to autonomously adjust the admission quota within 100-130 percent, considering their educational environment.

I want to share my experience as a doctor who entered the SNU College of Medicine in 1983 and graduated in six years.

I entered the school with 260 students, double the current enrollment quota. During the two years of the pre-medical course, academic warnings were the norm due to demonstrations and class boycotts, and 40-50 of my classmates flunked and could not enter the main medical course together. In my first year of the main course, the class load was murderous, with a student committing suicide during spring midterms, so demonstrations were out of the question. Even with a double-digit flunking every year, there were still about 260 students in the class because dropped-out seniors filled their seats until graduation.

The only lecture hall at SNU Medicine that could hold that many students was a Japanese-era auditorium, so, from my sophomore year, I took classes in a Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) auditorium. In the tiered lecture hall, students in the front half of the room could barely "hear" the lecture while the students in the back, who could see the professor in the distance, didn't mind about the lecture. Unlike in high school, there were no assigned seats, so it was on a first-come, first-served basis. Every day, I had to take the first bus to school at dawn, wait in line for the library to open, and secure a seat in the lecture hall to finish the day’s class properly.

There were many dropouts. It was inevitable that students who could not keep up would be dropped due to the lack of teaching capacity compared to the number of students. All labs, including anatomy, were done in groups, with only one or two students per group doing the labs, and the rest watching or just looking on. SNU medical students, who voluntarily prepared for the medical licensing exam like the bar exam at that time, were rather proud of the low passing rate.

That was because preventing the potential failures from graduating, rather than teaching all students well, was the only way to improve the passing rate of medical schools. When I became a professor at the University of Ulsan College of Medicine, I was shocked to find that all 40 students in my class were paying attention and engaged in lively question-and-answer sessions. This medical school started graduating its first class in 1993, and by 2006, it had created the mythology of a 100 percent passing rate 11 times.

What bothered me most throughout those four years was the difficulty in addressing basic human needs.

The women's restrooms were woefully inadequate. I had to run from the third-floor lecture hall to the first floor to use the restroom between back-to-back lectures with less than a 10-minute break. Decades later, my classmates still remember me running during breaks. Lunch was also a battle. The cafeteria lunch line, which cost 400 won per meal, stretched out of the dining hall to the front of the library every day.

Also, even if you met all the conditions for prioritized allocation, you had to have a special connection to move into a dormitory on campus. The dormitory at the University of Ulsan College of Medicine, which provides a two-person room to all students so that they can focus on their studies without worrying about food and livelihood since its opening, is the No. 1 contributor to the medical school’s competitiveness. If the capacity of the dormitory reaches 120 students, two more dormitory buildings are needed, but there is no land on campus to build them.

Aside from entrance and graduation classmates, if I add up the friends who were classmates for even one year, I can't know the total number of classmates. Many were expelled from the school after flunking repeatedly, or have had to go back to school and take a decade to graduate. Our classmates have always had to compete for internship, residency, clinical instructor, and faculty appointments, as well as for admission to graduate school and earning master's and doctoral degrees, waiting their turn in line.

Some of them have overcome adversity to become leading figures in K-medicine. However, several went to the U.S. and Canada to train, become professors, or open their clinics there to avoid a lifetime of exhausting competition. At the time, many took the U.S. medical licensing exam before graduation. The fact that the popularity of this exam is soaring after decades of decline seems to be a harbinger of Korean medicine's retreat into the past.

At this rate, next year's freshmen class at every medical school will be two to four times the current capacity, forcing them into a murderous survival competition with their peers to sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom in inferior educational environments, which are incomparable to the 30-percent increase of 40 years ago.

Ironically, the world's 10th-largest economy and a medical powerhouse has a "survival as a medical student" challenge in its education system. Moreover, as with any excess, there are bound to be losers. So, increasing doctors will be a distant goal and students will fall victim for good.

For the government to claim that there is no decline in the quality of medical education without a plan to increase the educational capacity is either reckless optimism or unintentionally ruining Korea's medical education and future. In the end, all will suffer. I wonder what the media and civic groups think when encouraging, instead of stopping, this policy. Now that the medical school entrance frenzy has already begun, someone should come out and tell the truth -- getting into medical school next year could be the worst decision they will ever make.