Applications to Harvard Medical School for next year's entering class dropped by 7.5 per cent, primarily as a result of rising tuition and room and board costs, Dr. Oglesby Paul '38, director of admissions at the Med School, said yesterday.

The number of applicants has dropped steadily for the past three years, and the trend will probably continue in the near future, Paul said. "We may be getting to an over-supply of physicians," he added.

Applications for the class entering in the fall of 1982 dropped by 300, to 3700, while the total cost of tuition, room and board, and books reached $15,000 a year at Harvard.

Paul said that in addition to rising expenses, the "increasingly attractive" alternative of business school, with its vast opportunities for post-graduate employment, has produced the drop in Med School applications.

Different Trends

Medical school application levels from around the country do not consistently reflect recent trends at Harvard.

Officials at Duke University said that they expect applications to fall off slightly this year, but Stanford, Cornell, and the University of California at San Francisco all expect increases for the coming year.

Although the overall number of applications to Harvard's Med School has slipped since 1978, the number of female applicants has increased by 3 per cent, from 1186 for the class entering in 1979 to 1257 for this year's entering class.

As a result of a nationwide increase in the number of female medical students, the overall enrollment in American medical schools reached an all-time high of 66,928 this year, according to statistics compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

In contrast to this trend, Harvard may formally reduce the size of its Med School classes within the next ten years because of the glut of doctors on the market, Paul said.

Officials at other schools agreed with Paul's assessment of the medical employment market but questioned any links between application levels at medical schools and business schools.

May G. King, Administrative Assistant for the admissions committee at Duke medical school, attributed the drop there exclusively to the general decrease in the nation's birth rate.

Harvard Business School has, in fact, received an increasing number of applications over the past five years, officials said yesterday. The size of the applicant pool has increased from 4695 for the entering class of 1977 to 7313 for this year's entering class.