Peter Allen applied to 30 medical schools after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh last year. Twenty-eight said no. Of the two that said yes, one had something in common with Allen: It, too, was starting out in medicine. He enrolled in the inaugural class of The Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pa. 'I was ecstatic that I had been accepted to a medical school,' Allen said, adding that he would have gone for a master's in bioengineering if he had not been accepted. 'It's a giant sigh of relief; it secures your plans for the rest of your life really.' The Commonwealth is one of nearly two dozen medical schools that have recently opened or might open across the country, the most at any time since the 1960s and '70s. These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter-century. Many bright students were fleeing to offshore medical schools, or giving up hope entirely, when they could not get into domestic schools. Meanwhile, American hospitals were using foreign-trained and foreign-born physicians to fill a dearth in medical residencies. During the 1980s and '90s only one new medical school was established. 'Huge numbers of qualified American kids were not getting into American medical schools or going abroad to study,' Dr. Lawrence G. Smith, dean of the proposed Hofstra University School of Medicine, in Hempstead, N.Y., which is not yet recruiting students, said last week. 'I think it was a kind of wake-up call.' The proliferation of new schools is also a market response to a rare convergence of forces: a growing population; the aging of the health-conscious baby-boom generation; the impending retirement of, by some counts, as many as a third of current doctors; and the expectation that, the present political climate notwithstanding, health care reform will eventually bring a tide of newly insured patients into the American health care system. If all the schools being proposed actually opened, they would amount to an 18 percent increase in the 131 medical schools across the country. (By comparison, there are 200 law schools approved by the American Bar Association.) 