Introduction:

The recent inclusion policies to democratize the access to higher education have urged the development of researches that assess the socioeconomic profile of students, even more in courses of high competition and prestige, such as medicine.

Method:

In this sense, a cross-sectional study was carried out with the application of tri-analytic questionnaires in a sample of 381 students, with the objective of describing the socioeconomic profile of medical undergraduate students from Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), as well as learning about aspects related to their academic life and future professional performance expectations. To analyze the data, SPSS Inc. Software 18 was used in 20 variables that addressed the socioeconomic profile, aspects related to the students’ academic life, and career expectations.

Results:

The study results show that the medical student profile consists of 50.7% women, 52.8% of brown ethnicity, mean age of 23 years, 50.4% from Salvador and its metropolitan region, 38.8% of the students have a high family income, 55.6% of them studied most of the high school years in private schools and for 58% of the students, college admission did not occur through affirmative actions. For 73% of students, medicine is the first degree. Almost all the students (98.4%) stated that they intend to do a specialization, highlighting the gap in the generalist career, demanded by the Brazilian health system.

Conclusion:

The results show that even with the implementation of affirmative action policies, the medical course continues to be predominantly an elite course and institutions tend to prioritize teaching spaces, to the detriment of other pillars of the university.

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