So > 70 yo graduates?
I recall reading about some researchers that studied patients at a large walk-in clinic in a low income area. Both the set of patients and the set of doctors were diverse. Patients were randomly assigned to doctors.
What they found was that patients were significantly more likely to follow the doctor's instructions after the visit (such as getting prescriptions filled, following the doctor's home care instructions, or coming back for follow ups) if the doctor was the same race/ethnic group as the patient.
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2020/novembe...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/ivy-leagues-grade-inflation...
I guess the other possibilities are that the students have gotten better or have optimized for the system?
This author says that the students were complaining and not because they were getting better.
https://qz.com/157579/confession-of-an-ivy-league-teaching-a...
This article says that the students haven't gotten better either.
https://uvachemistry.com/2014/12/13/the-causes-and-consequen...
This was the exact pretext used by Harvard in the early 20th century to reduce the number of Jews in attendance.
> As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
> The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
> The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities.
Somewhat less snarkily, I was under the impression that medical schools hate not graduating their students, so once you're in, basically anybody who can physically survive the grind will become a doctor. Is this incorrect?
Doesn't that suck for everyone?
In Germany, there is a (apparently) large generation gap of countryside doctors. The old ones retire, but no one young shows up to replace them, even though they are very well paid. But what 30 year old would want to live and work in a village of 5000?
Is that scenario not applicable in the US, or are the jobs you mentioned simply still considered a better deal.
Married with kids and want to move to the country to settle down. Isn’t that what a lot of 30-year-olds do? Especially middle class people like doctors.
(That's speaking in broad generalizations, of course. This isn't the usual case, but there are broad parts of (especially Eastern) Germany that are depopulating rapidly since there are so few job opportunities)
https://breitbandmessung.de/kartenansicht has a scrollable map, but it doesn't say from when the measurements are, nor if "no coverage" means that there is no coverage, or if they have performed no measurements there.
But you're probably lucky to get into the double digits of Mbps. Note how the whole map tops out at ">= 50Mbps".
So IMO not applicable.
[0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/spacex-toch...
I believe they will make it by 2024 or perhaps a bit sooner (if Starship development goes well - that ship has an enormous cargo capacity to LEO), but it isn't an option for most people yet.
https://nhsc.hrsa.gov/loan-repayment/nhsc-rural-community-lo...
But those programs generally only apply to physicians who have finished residency. We really need to increase funding for residency programs in general so that those are no longer a limiting factor in training new physicians.
Being picky on specialty, or location, is going to make a match more difficult. A Competitive specialty like Ortho, Radiology, or Radiation Oncology trying for a big city that is popular would be a hard fit. Due to how few Radiation Oncology programs there are, even a class valedictorian may not get in - there are just not that many slots.
A less desirable specialty like family practice or internal medicine would be a much easier fit for a lower ranked candidate.
So you know that the bar was lowered if they aren't from ethnicity X. Interesting. Is that the doctor you want for you, or your loved ones?
> The results are not achieved by different standards for graduation, but by different standards for admission.
That's debatable.
The fundamental problem with medicine that creates these dynamics is artificial supply constraints created by licensing regimes (I've yet to figure out how or why a MD is so much better than a PA for family medicine). Absent that, the market would just figure things out.
There's no particular reason to believe high test scores are 100% correlated with future doctor quality given that lots of other factors go into being a doctor - and yet medical schools have historically relied on this. On the other hand, there's also no particular reason to believe the best doctors will be equally distributed across whatever splicing and dicing of the population you perform.
This is the key callout I think. It allows you to address representation problems while sidestepping opposing arguments about graduate quality.
Do it in rounds, unfilled spots open up to anyone.
If your child really wants to be a doctor but can’t get a spot, well, I’m sure that increased demand for medical spots means you’re willing to pay more, and the University can use that to expand their medical program. Or you can send them to another university.
This seems like a reasonable approach to improving systemic inequalities without causing systemic harm.
There is still the question as to whether certain admission standards are actually correlated with graduate ability. I wonder if there is a way to find out?
But yeah, I think the difficulty of sociology makes it tough to reason about these issues in a comprehensive, logical way. And it's so hard to experimentally prove _anything_ when proving the counterfactual is "well, we'd need to split reality into two and wait 50 years".
One year this would mean that the intake would be solely one ethnicity, and it was not white.
So the policy was abandoned for a more rounded approach.
These days the medical schools try very hard to make the population of graduating doctors look like the population they are going to treat.
This drives the (rich) parents of white students who just miss out getting into medical school extremely irate and litigious. But so far it has withstood attack.
The results are not achieved by different standards for graduation, but by different standards for admission.