<p>All told, how many spots are there in the combined BS/MD programs and how many students apply? It would be interesting to know of those who apply and not make it, how many still go on to become a doctor. </p>
<p>As the spouse of a doctor who saw med school up close and personal, as someone who had friends go through NU’s program (which was 6 years at the time, though it is now 7) I would be very, very unlikely to want my child to go through such an accelerated program and miss out on being broadened. There’s more to life than job training.</p>
<p>I don’t really think a highschooler is informed enough to make a decision to become an engineer. Sometimes things work out, but often they don’t. Engineering education is not the template for everything.</p>
<p>I am curious about the age of the children of Beliavsky and others who are arguing for early professionalization. With my kids, now in their mid-20s, and looking back on the last 10 years, early professionalization clearly would have been a terrible idea. I sense lots of parents with older kids feel the same way.</p>
<p>They are young, below 10. I understand that a risk of early professionalization is that one may never consider certain other careers because there was no time to take a wide range of courses. OTOH, some people may only discover that medical school is not for them only by actually going to medical school. It is better to make this discovery sooner rather than later, so that they can prepare for other careers. If the first two years of medical school were the last two years of a BA, student who did not want to continue their medical studies could quit with a BA and go sell life insurance or whatever.</p>
<p>I find it amusing when parents of 9th or 10th graders write on CC with complete confidence about their children’s interests and career plans. Very few of my kids’ friends are doing what anyone (including themselves) thought they would be doing when they were 15. And even the ones who look like they are on a constant course have often had some real twists and turns. They’ll say something like “he has a passion for aeronautical engineering and finance,” and I will think “No, he doesn’t. Neither they nor he have any clear idea what he will actually care about.”</p>
<p>EDIT: Just want to make clear I am not talking about Beliavsky here. I don’t remember him every doing that. I do, however, believe he will be less confident about the benefits of early specialization when his kids are 20 than he is when they are not yet 10.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, that strategy makes little sense. Why make a child “declare” and commit to a path at a young age? Why not just let it unfold naturally and organically as it does in the current system? You’re trying to fix something that isn’t broken. </p>
<p>I’m married to one of those doctors who knew from age 3 he wanted to be a doctor, and still he wouldn’t have touched the BS/MD programs with a ten-foot pole. There’s too much that is valuable about exploration of other options and getting a broader education to arbitrarily cut it short.</p>
<p>I agree with JHS. I would have been convinced I had a budding chemist and a budding creative writer on my hands three years ago. Now I have a budding economics major and a budding history major / politician. </p>
<p>And let’s face it - there would be a LOT of parental pressure from some quarters for a teen to “declare” being a doctor. That’s one thing that worries me about BS/MD programs. How many kids are there because they want to be, versus parents pushed them there thinking medicine was secure and lucrative? Lot easier for a 21 yo with a bachelors to tell pushy parents to buzz off, than a 15 yo still dependent on parents’ purse strings.</p>
<p>That’s not the risk of early specialization. The risk is that countries which has early gatekeeper systems for the professions weed out late-bloomers, kids with attention disorders who could have been phenomenal in a particular field, kids with extreme creativity who don’t fit the narrow mold of the educational system. I have cousins living in such countries- the one who probably would have become an architect or engineer in the US is decorating cakes at a commercial bakery; the one who would have done something highly quantitative (really a math prodigy, but not neurotypical and did not do well in school for behavior reasons) is a book-keeper with a certificate from a two year post HS program.</p>
<p>I am less worried about the kids who “make it” into the early feeder systems and decide at age 40 they hate being doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs- they live in countries where a doctor can enroll in cooking school or become an interior decorator. But it doesn’t work in the reverse- a kid with the “wrong” kind of HS diploma is not able to enter university. </p>
<p>Think about successful people you know in the US- the late-bloomers who would have been tracked into non-academic programs at age 14. What a waste of human capital. Why should we envy a system that tracks young teenagers in such a way? My cousin the cake decorator (probably earning minimum wage after 10 years) looks at the US educational system as the envy of the world.</p>
<p>In practice, that is usually not a big problem for the student – if the student decides to change major after three semesters of engineering curriculum, s/he can typically do so easily without delaying graduation (the engineering major courses have significant overlap with science majors, and humanities and social studies majors typically do not have long prerequisite sequences that would delay graduation for late major changers).</p>
<p>Makes one wonder whether it is possible to design and implement an educational system that encourages higher achievement and serves the high achievers well (like in some other countries), while also allowing multiple routes and second chances for the late bloomers and late deciders (like in the US).</p>
<p>I didn’t decide til late in my college career to go to med school. Luckily I had the prereqs because I knew I’d be doing <em>some</em> kind of science. I’m so glad I went into medicine (pediatrics). My husband knew he was going into medicine from a young age. He loves his job too, but liked being able to study other things in undergrad. </p>
<p>We had BS/MD kids in my med school class-- in their college it was called “Target MD”. They were… okay. Some were really bright, some were not, some were fun, all were naive. Many became the class “gunners”-- eye rolls aplenty when they raised their hands in class to ask questions. They were very much “is this going to be on the test?” kind of kids-- probably from only knowing college as a being shot-out-of-a-cannon feeling.</p>
<p>blossom, I think both sides of the coin are unfortunate: the late bloomers (or, as I like to call them, just normal people) whose tastes and interests evolve past age 15 who would get shut out, AND those who think (or their parents think) they should want to be X, get pushed into X and realize too late that in point of fact they hate X. Anyway, I don’t see the problem with the current system that needs fixing.</p>
<p>However, it does seem that a lot of regular pre-meds are “gunners” (in undergrad) because of the necessity of maintaining a high GPA to get into any medical school. Also, many of them, and many pre-law students for whom GPA is also very important, appeared to shy away from intellectual exploration in favor of taking what they think are “easy A” courses.</p>
<p>True, ucbaulumnus. Interestingly, though, I found (and so did my husband in his med school) that there is a separation IN med school into a new “gunner” group, with other students able to be more laid-back. After all, you’re in. I had a great time in med school. I did not think it was that difficult, except for the amount of material you’re expected to know in a short amount of time. I thought undergrad was harder. </p>
<p>In my husband’s med school they played “Gunner Bingo”. Had cards made up with spaces for stupid questions (“Will this be on the test?” “Was that in our reading?”) along with the names of those front-row kids who they know would ask a question. When you filled a row you had to figure out a way to yell “Bingo!” without getting the stinkeye from the lecturing prof. Prize=pitcher of beer later. Genius.</p>
<p>My ideal education system would be a hybrid taking the best of both the US and foreign education systems so high academic achievers are better served along with the late bloomers. </p>
<p>The US system’s strength is in providing second, third, and more chances for late bloomers and those who don’t fit the standard educational mold. </p>
<p>However, the US educational culture in some circles also seem to feel it’s wrong to have a publicly supported school geared towards educating high academic achievers as shown in Mayor Lindsay and company’s misguided efforts to shut down the NYC Specialized High Schools and the effective dismantling of the old CCNY/CUNY by abruptly implementing open admissions which ended up turning once elite public institutions into educationally mediocre systems overwhelmed by remedial students at the expense of the high academic achievers who voted with their feet to go elsewhere…especially when free tuition was eliminated in 1975. There’s also the matter of American universities being extremely expensive by world standards…including many of our public institutions. </p>
<p>On the flipside, foreign academic systems in Europe and Asia tend to focus their academic education and free/nominal cost universities on the academic elite identified as early as the end of middle school which helps the high academic achievers while being so rigidly inflexible and cutthroat competitive at times that late bloomers and those who screwed up even once in K-8 may be permanently shut out of a university education unless they’re wealthy enough to go abroad to more flexible systems like the ones here in the US. </p>
<p>They also have a version of “impacted major on steroids” where the grades on the school leaving exam or national college exam score not only determine which university you’re permitted to attend, but also the major you’ll study. Back in my parents’ day in the ROC(Taiwan), those with the highest national exam scores got to study popular fields like Medicine or Foreign Language & Literature whereas the lower scores ended up in less popular fields like law* or Chinese lit*. </p>
<ul>
<li>In the '50s, both fields…even law were regarded in the same way as many extremely vocationally minded US parents here would regard majors in arts/music, humanities, or social science fields…impractical and route to uncertain employment upon graduation.</li>
</ul>
<p>ucb: It was so early in the process that I can’t imagine they all knew what specialty they wanted to go into. Most were just that way (probably from birth!). They couldn’t help themselves. Non-coincidentally, they never came out drinking with us, either. Many ended up going into non-competitive fields, so I don’t think a residency goal was their reason for their gunnerness. They were just really driven.</p>
<p>Yes. This is the constant balance - the benefit of the BS / MD programs is that if you’re guaranteed admission, you can try that course on Asian art history or whatever. I can only speak for Northwestern, about which I have a little limited info, but it’s my understanding that their philosophy in moving from the 6-year program that they had in my era to a 7-year program was to enable and encourage students to do a bit more exploring outside the sciences, be able to take that Asian art history course, and so forth. That otherwise, getting them adequately prepped to move into med school after 2 years just wasn’t consistent with academic exploration, and that students suffered as a result.</p>
<p>Yes, that’s why we have Michigan, Berkeley, and other such fine public state universities. Cobrat, we are not talking about <em>your</em> high school, which is unimportant in the scheme of things.</p>
<p>I am more cynical about American higher education than you are, so when I read about a university making a 6-year program a 7-year one, or of a college no longer giving credit for AP exams (a change Dartmouth made recently), I suspect that a major reason is to increase tuition revenue.</p>