Little people? Are we talking height challenged people or people who didn’t go to elite colleges?
Yes. Evidently, everyone in a hospital knows who the good and bad doctors are.
Whatever is said about 'easy" route to become an MD, sorry, it may exists somewhere else, it does not exist in this country, period!! Not possible, not seen and any resident would laugh into your face if you tell them that. That only means one thing - having no idea at all what it takes. However, it certainly NOT required to attend Harvard or any other Elite college, you can skip this part and focus on something that will be required of you on this extremely hard path - extremely hard work and dedication under huge pressure and stress that you will will by each cell of your body for many many years, including college.
@MiamiDAP I wasn’t saying that (don’t know where you got that impression). There is no easy route to become an MD, but there are easier routes to simply get into medical school. They are still not that easy overall, but ultimately it is nowhere near as grueling as getting through the MD programs and residency/fellowships. The undergraduate pre-medical training is just a portion of the picture that I was commenting on. There are ways to “play with” and optimize that part that cannot be done in other stage (lots of GPA management schemes to be employed with ease once you learn the school).
Like in med. school, you have no choice but to take tons of STEM modules together and you have no choice over instructor for each, mainly in the pre-clinical stages. College is a different story. You are in a pageant contest to make you and your stats look pretty for medical school. It is sort of like a harder version of HS, except even in college admissions, rigor of schedule is rewarded. With pre-health, a balance is needed because of the high statistical standards of admission. They are going to lower their GPA standards because one student attempted to take very ambitious course schedules and scored too many B grades for example. They aren’t typically even that friendly toward engineering majors regardless of how personable they are. If the engineer, despite the heavier than normal STEM course load, does not have a similar GPA to competitors from other majors, then their chances will diminish. Unless ultra-bright, you cannot get away with as many risks as those considering say doctoral programs in STEM or MBA programs in the future. Too many applications to med. schools, so few spots.
They (adcoms) likely do not have enough time to truly sift through applications. They look for the pre-requisites/expected courses, overall GPA, and move on. Again, you could theoretically (and trust me, many try) get through university STEM curriculum avoiding a challenge at particularly high levels and end up rewarded for it in the med. school admissions game. As long as those pre-reqs on there and say A/A-/B+ and the MCAT is decent, no one will or has to know how they achieved those grades. In addition, most instructors aren’t going to write about how easy their course was or how many others scored well in rec. letters they agreed to write (many instructors are even unaware of how their courses compare to other instructors’ ).
The data in the article presented by the OP is fairly consistent with this piece of research:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/coep.12115/pdf
What this tells me is that employers are not as easily fooled by fluff courses as some would like to think. It is not so much a more “standardized curricula” or “accreditation requirements” that makes it possible for STEM grads from lesser schools to do well, but that their knowledge base can be easily quantified.
Everything being equal, it behooves students to try and get into the most elite school they can, and study the most quantitative major they can handle.
Not the most quantitative major, Canuck. The most rigorous.
I am happy to hire a philosophy major from University of Chicago. That’s not a quantitative major. It’s a rigorous major. That new hire can be taught how to calculate net present value in two hours. I am happy to hire an Art History major from Williams. That new hire can read a dense 100 page report and crank out an “Executive Summary” of two pages plus an appendix, regardless of the subject matter. It will be succinct, accurate, and grammatically correct.
Not everything is STEM, and not every STEM major is qualified to work in corporate strategy, new business development, marketing, investor relations, corporate communications, or any of the other 40+ functions that a large corporation needs to staff.
You can major in archaeology or Renaissance Studies.
“Not everything is STEM, and not every STEM major is qualified to work in corporate strategy, new business development, marketing, investor relations, corporate communications, or any of the other 40+ functions that a large corporation needs to staff.”
You can always tell people with no real-world business experience. They think whatever the scientific “invention” is itself is the whole point, and are completely and utterly clueless about the types of (very excellent and well-paying) careers blossom mentions here. They pat themselves on the back that they are “smarter” than these people who are “only” head of corporate public relations or human resources or whatnot. But they couldn’t handle those jobs at all. They’d do a horrid job, and their understanding of theoretical physics wouldn’t rescue them.
There are a couple of websites, Doximity and healthcheck where people can try to find out where the doctors were trained if that is the most important factor for selecting one.
Say it, blossom.
Some folks think so narrowly. It’s not even good for stem to only think quantitatively. The best, the most visionary, do more than that. But if one can’t, they won’t see the need.
Folks on CC don’t like to contemplate the idea that there are marginal STEM students. Kids majoring in bio with a C minus average from a directional state college. Kids failing freshman chem from a small private LAC known for a nurturing environment.
Sigh. But the truth in Canuck’s post is that employers are not fooled by fluff courses, regardless of the discipline. I am not impressed when a kid with an undergrad business degree wants a job in market research when he or she has only taken “buyer behavior”. At most colleges with an undergrad business degree, buyer behavior IS the fluff course. Take a two semester statistics sequence from the applied math department. Take the one semester statistics class that psych and anthro majors are required to take (“methods in social science research” or something of that ilk). But don’t claim you want a job in market research if you took the easy way out.
Rigor folks. It’s sad that (apparently) medical schools don’t care about rigor as long as you’ve kept your GPA high enough and have taken the right premed req’s (although I suspect that a heavy diet of fluff doesn’t put your brain in gear for MCAT’s and what is to come). But if your kid wants a job after graduation, don’t kid yourselves that recruiters from Deloitte or Boeing or Merck or Pfizer or P&G or Amazon or GE don’t know the difference between the easy A courses and the rigorous ones on the campuses where they recruit heavily.
@snarlatron
I agree completely.
Is there a comparison for minorties? Surely for black students with identical scores and similar backgrounds, the ones who got into ivies through affirmative action are going to reap large benefits over those blacks who attended state or local schools.
But what about asian students- was there a breakdown on those who did or did not squeeze through the quotas to get a place in the ivies? How did they fare differently?
For whites there are far too many variables; economic climate one graduates in, majors, family, regional differences, varying middle class levels, male/female, etc…
My child’s artistic program had its own type of “ivy” schools. The question among parents was whether the top schools really were the best at training or were they, by virture of being able to select the cream of the crop, able to produce students who would have succeeded anyway. My opinion is that these schools, had they not had that advantage, would be far less impressive than they appeared. A few decads ago these same caliber of students were performing professionally without college at all. And today, most admitted to these schools are already semi pro or professional. It’s basically just a polishing they need, if that. These students attend mostly for the industry contacts, exposure, and credential status.
However, if you put them into this study it would naturally reveal that persons graduating from the “ivy” programs made the most money a dozen years out vs the hundreds who graduate from less competetive programs. But again, these students are already so talented the outcome would be the same for them anyway.
^ I don’t think that it’s fair to say that med schools don’t care about rigor. More that the baseline rigor expected is already fairly high. The publics med schools that tend to be the ones that adhere most to strict GPA cut-offs tend to draw mainly from their in-state flagship(s) and they would be well-acquainted with the rigor of the core pre-med courses there (and they’re almost certainly harder than “stats for social science majors”). You could argue that it may be unfair some folks get dinged for taking even harder courses, but public med schools have dual mandates to try to draw from all segments of their state population while maintaining standards high enough to graduate competent doctors.
Would you hire a philosophy or art history major from a less elite school like CSU Bakersfield?
In reading back through this thread I see people had quite a bit of fun with my “quad bypass” surgeon post. You know why I think it’s important? Because, as I noted in another post, I’ve watched kids grow up with my D and where they went to college. The few that went to elite schools from her HS had extra drive, extra intelligence, extra thoroughness. etc. They weren’t just competent, they were excellent. A well-trained surgeon can do a routine bypass … but what happens in a more complex case? My mother needed a quad bypass but was otherwise in good health. The surgery was going to be a piece of cake as far as these things go. Unfortunately, she was two months short of her 65th birthday so she had to be transported a few hours away to a VA hospital for the procedure rather than stay in our major metropolitan hospital (a well-known heart center). I’m sure the VA surgeon went through all the training and had plenty of experience. However, he did not notice until well into the procedure that her heart walls were “fragile” from long-term reduced blood flow. He only did three bypasses and closed her up … she died a few hours later from a massive rupture. It may not have mattered who did the surgery … but it was 16 years ago yesterday and I can’t help but think that someone with the “extra” bit may have noticed something earlier, had been drilled in school a little more, or simply kept up with the latest techniques better.
No one outside California knows what the heck CSU Bakersfield means, so who can assess what “less elite” means in that context? Is CSU Bakersfield a school which admits anyone with a pulse, or is it a decent regional school? This is a rhetorical question, ucb, so you needn’t actually answer it.
@mtmcmt :
In Berg & Dale’s second study, they found that 1st Gen college students, as well as Black, Latino, and lower SES students did increase their earnings by attending an elite college. They were the exception. I don’t think that they studied the effect on Asian students.
" but there are easier routes to simply get into medical school. " - Well, I have not heard of an “easy” college Orgo. Physics and even intro Bio may be way beyond your HS AP Bio, if the college program has this as a weed out class. I also never heard of any pre-med program that does NOT include a weed out class. The idea of “easy” pre-med is where the good number of initial pre-meds (about 85%) do not survive on their track and sadly it includes many HS vals. Again, I am not familiar with the rigor of Elite colleges at all, I am talking strictly about programs at in-state publics, including some of the lowest of the lowest ranked (like our local college). Granted, maybe there are easy pre-med programs, but not in our state and we do not have a single Elite college here.
“Simply get into medical school” means that after you happen to be a part of the 15% that actually survive on the pre-med track and your pre-med committee is supporting you in your medical school application cycle, then you have a 40% chance of actually being accepted to any American medical school, I am talking about a single acceptance here. It does not sound “simple” to me. If this is simple than what is challenging?
Okay, I’ll wade into this, perhaps against my better judgment.
I have taught at a range of universities, ranging from one of the most selective in the nation (though not an Ivy) to an open-access university (my current institution). I have also been a full-time student at an even wider range, from a community college to an Ivy.
With that as my bona fides, I want to speak to course rigor, since that was discussed quite a bit upthread, with the general assumption being that (maybe aside from engineering, as long as there’s ABET accreditation) students get a more rigorous education at a more selective school.
That is, in my experience, both true and false.
In lower-division courses, I would say that it is most definitely true. Students at lower-selectivity schools are coming in, generally speaking, less prepared, and the content covered in courses does reflect that, since students often have to be ramped up to proper college-level work. (Note that I’m leaving to the side lower-division honors courses at low-selectivity schools.) Even with that, though, many students at lower-selectivity colleges can’t handle the load for any of a number of reasons (not necessarily academic, by the way), and that’s one reason the completion rate at low-selectivity schools tends to be so low.
Once you get to upper-division courses, however, there’s been a weeding out of students at the lower-selectivity schools (and, to a lesser extent, at the higher-selectivity ones), and the course rigor is, in my experience, pretty much equivalent across the board—so when I’ve taught courses in, say, History of North American Basketweaving at high-selectivity and low-selectivity schools, the content and outcomes have been the same.
TL;DR: You can’t easily generalize about course rigor among different institutions without drilling down further than people usually do.
p.s. If I’m going into the hospital for a quad bypass, I’m probably doing so after being wheeled into the emergency room. At that point I don’t care even about where my doctors had their residencies—I’m simply worried that they’re there and are supplied with sharp scalpels, assuming I’m even conscious!
Since we’re using the heart surgery example, what that renowned cardiologist with tippy top credentials missed, btw, was my mother’s need for triple bypass. (Beats me how it wasn’t obvious.) Because she was so dismissive, the internist recommended the cardio in the adjoining suite. Yup, state U educated. The point isn’t where the latter trained or if the world knows him, but his individual commitment and ability.
In some respects, that’s what I take from some of blossom’s words. And PG. The individual, not some mythical superiority in monolithic credentials.
@dfbdfb excellent perspective. Thx.
“Once you get to upper-division courses, however, there’s been a weeding out of students at the lower-selectivity schools” - cannot tell about all programs across, but a well designed pre-med program will have a weed out class in the first semester of the freshman year so that the students do not waste their time in the track were they do not belong. They are getting cut not because of failure, but primarily realizing that their sub-par (predictable!) college GPA of 3.5 or lower simply will not cut it for medical school, this includes ANY college of any standing / ranking.
Actually, thinking about my own experience at the Community College in CS program, way back when we could not do our assignments from home. The fact was that the goal of very first programming class was to cut 70% of the class simply because the Computer Lab could not handle us all. The goal was accomplished, only 30% of class survived!