@MYOS1634 what is your background? Just curious.
I am not a physician but I advise kids, in particular lower income gifted kids, so I try to keep up to date with these things, but there are always changes. Hence my calling on people who know the exact current practice.
The opposition a nursing major applying to med school is (was?) also due to the fact the science classes are the ‘light’ versions compared to what pre-meds take and the philosophy difference (patient-centered v. Diagnosis-centered if I properly recall what I was told).
Note that a nurse with years of practice who wishes to change careers isn’t in the same ‘basket’ so to speak as a college student.
Did the students they compared have the same SAT and AP exam scores in high school (because not all GPAs are created equal)? A lot of low income students in state colleges require remedial courses. I also think a lot of kids that enter college below par don’t realize they have to double their efforts to “catch up.” They think they have earned the right to play video games, smoke dope, hookup culture, party and join a sorority/fraternity, but the reality is they’re not equipped to handle those distractions.
I guess it’s not politically correct to directly explain to lower achieving kids they don’t get to have a stereotypical college movie experience. If the want to change their life they have to double and triple the efforts of the more polished peers.
“which led to things like recommending sports communications as a major because the student liked sports and then the student switching out and not graduating on time) and how that affects the outcomes.”
I’ve had old students return and tell me they are pursuing those [easier, lightweight] majors because more marketable degrees were “too hard.” How can a college force low-income kids to bust their tail and work 2x 3x as hard for a better degree? It’s not money or lack of good advice, it’s grit, ability to delay gratification and determination.
And don’t discount U advisors pushing low-income students into easier majors to prop up graduation rates. You think colleges REALLY want to handhold (and subsidize) low-income students through 5 or 6 years of a STEM degree? They know from seeing over the years these teens rarely 2x 3x their efforts, they want to have fun, so they just nudge them towards easier “happy” departments.
I’ve had kids tell me “Mrs. @momof2g1b I was struggling before, but I love my [easy dept.] classes!” Translation: I was bombing everything difficult, I’m getting easy grades in this department, therefore it’s now my major.
Idk I tend to think 90+ % of kids are baked in the cake by college. All these efforts are typically futile, most frequently they tinker with something to manufacture a fake bottom line outcome.
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Acceptable? Yes, definitely. Preferred? No. Nurses, nutritionists, and physicians all play very different roles in healthcare and have very different expectations, as such, I wouldn’t agree that a nursing degree prepares someone better for medical school than a Spanish degree + prereqs. The Spanish degree + pre reqs would be preferred - and I say this as someone who has served as screener of apps at my med school. At Brown at least, Spanish studies would not only be the language but also some degree of sociology, history, religious studies, literature, art history, etc (at least, that’s what my Classics degree was).
I would imagine if you pressed someone as to the “why” behind this thinking, the first thing they would jump to is that nurses generally just observe, report, and follow orders. They are not primary decision makers and are not expected/required to stay up to date on advances in medicine the way a physician is. Being in the final months of my MD/PhD training, I can say that the vast majority of medical students are barely equipped with the skills needed to critically evaluate biomedical research. I have outperformed many residents when it comes to critiquing clinical trials both in terms of the quality of my critiques and the speed in which I can read and analyze an article. When compared to my peers with PhDs (+/-) MDs, I am by no means special in my abilities to critique the literature. I would argue that memorizing the amount of the basic sciences usually required for a nursing degree is not better preparation for this task than using primary and secondary literature to analyze the way drama was used in ancient Greece as a way to critique politicians and inform the public.
I couldn’t agree more. One of my favorite quotes from former Brown President Ruth Simmons on why she, a poor black woman raised in Jim Crow South, chose to pursue a PhD in French Literature: “Because everything belongs to me. There is nothing, nothing that is withheld from me simply because I am poor.” If you see her 60 mins interview where she delivers the quote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5uaVFfX3AQ&feature=youtu.be&t=11m35s), you can tell it is not said with blase entitlement but with fierce determination. As a poor black woman in that era, she probably worked quadruple and quintuple the efforts of her more polished peers in order to get to where she is now.
I used to work as an advisor/counselor for low income/first gen students at a non-selective school that had a nursing program. Students would often tell me that they wanted to be doctors , but didn’t see that as a major listed, so they signed up for pre-nursing to get a nursing major and then go to med school. They had no idea that the nursing major does not cover the pre-med requirements–no orgo, no physics, light bio, etc etc. And no time to fit these into the rigid nursing sequence. Plus, it’s a weedout program which is often a GPA killer. So I’d tell them this, and they’d say, oh, maybe I’ll be a nurse. I dunno. Like they realized they’d already messed up and the die was cast. This should have been told to them when they were registering, not when i ran into them in the support program. I wasn’t supposed to be the expert, but there was a vacuum I’d try to fill.
I feel for these kids. If the most successful professional you have ever met is your pediatrician-- then boom, you want to become a doctor. If the most successful person on your block is a nurse, and nursing is medicine, it makes total sense that nursing is a path to becoming a physician.
Actually, that is what they are usually told – their HS credentials will only get them into the community college or the commuter based non flagship state university. But those with wealthy parents sometimes indulge them with the residential college experience at expensive less selective private schools or out of state flagships.
Brown has a LOT to learn about nurses. Comments border on uninformed. Experienced nurses save real doctors asses every day. The smart doctors know that.
Key phrase there: experienced nurses. A kid applying to medical school in the final year of their bachelor’s in nursing is FAR from an experienced nurse
And yes, nurses catch a lot of mistakes and are incredibly helpful, but the smart nurses know their limitations and don’t think they have the same responsibilities and duties as a physician
After reading the article in the OP, it seems to me that this is not primarily about wealthy parents. I think it is primarily about having a good relationship with you kids, and concierge parenting. Wealth is a plus, but most of it can be done by parents who educate themselves and take this approach. They don’t need to be wealthy.
@Much2learn: Only if the parents themselves are educated or can be educated.
Are you going to ask parents who never went to college and may not have graduated from HS to educate themselves?
@Purpletitan I am saying that the title is, “New study shows how wealthy parents and their involvement with the children drastically changes the college experience.”
My thoughts about that:
- There are a lot of educated parents who do a good job guiding their student and provide a lot of the benefits of this approach without being wealthy.
- While it is certainly easier to do if you have more education, it isn’t rocket science. A parent who is not college educated, but can read could learn a whole lot about improving their students’ odds of success by reading and asking questions on cc:. It isn’t rocket science.
- It may be that less wealthy and less educated parents don’t care, or aren’t interested, or just don’t know what it is that they don’t know, but that is a different issue.
- To me, it highlights that college students benefit significantly from parents who do a good job of counseling, guiding, and supporting them.
Parental educational attainment is probably the true correlate to being able to usefully assist kids through college.
However, it is also correlated with wealth, despite exceptions.
Regarding point 2 in reply #35, the less knowledgeable parents often do not know where to start or whom to ask. Sometimes, they may be misled by poorly informed counselors or other parents, resulting in their kids having fewer college choices than they would have if they had full information.
In the article, they describe parents who are wealthy but did not necessarily go to college. The kids who party aren’t the lower income kids. They’re the kids with the means to. The parents are very involved in making sure their daughters join the right sororities, wear the right clothes and the right brands, hang out with the right guys. The daughters’ job at college is to network and fit in, and graduate with lots of contacts. They’re not focused on educational attainment but on their daughter’s appearance and social prospects - sometimes recognizing later on that it was a mistake.
The lower income kids’ problem is that they and their parents trust the university when it tells them there are all these resources available. They don’t realize that after budget cuts in particular support services were cut (they have nothing to compare their kids’ situation to) and thus that getting help is not as available or the people in charge as available. They don’t realize that the university assumes parents will provide that guidance and will help their kids. They trust the adviser. They don’t know that they should check that a person whose job it is to help them make a schedule, actually provided them with a good schedule. They may not know the difference between drop and withdrew passing and how either doesn’t affect GPA. They often believe that a degree that sounds practical comes with a job at graduation, v. a job that has no clear professional jobs attached to it - sports communication may sound better to them than an English major with a concentration in non fiction writing complemented with internships with the d1 college teams, because the second path has to be built and they have no mental reference to build it. And when the degree doesn’t come with a job they feel betrayed. The freshman seminars are supposed to make that clear but many kids consider these seminzrs stupid because they may know a lot of that stuff, except no one knows all of the information contained in the course and few can decipher what will be crucial to their college and post-graduation careers.
Myos- yes. If you are from a low income family, do you really know that the people who represent major league players in their contract negotiations did NOT start out as sports management majors? They majored in history or political science and did well, they got into a top law school and went to work at a big law firm and focused on contracts (of all kinds) before branching out into a specialty. Does this same kid know that the big guns who run influential PR agencies majored in Literature and not PR? Or that a degree in econ with a heavy stats emphasis is better prep for a lucrative career at Disney, a major airline, or major hotel chain that a degree in Hospitality Management?
There is a lot of shade being thrown in this thread. Just like colleges, there are very good nursing, education, social work, and communications programs, and there are bad ones. The top sports management programs are heavy on business classes, have a legal emphasis and embedded internships. Students and parents are capable of doing the research (in school, at home or in the public library) to see which schools excel and place their graduates and which don’t. Personally, I don’t see what is wrong with choosing a major you love, as long as you fill in your educational resume with other practical courses like accounting, for example. If you like what you .are studying, you usually perform better, and will graduate in 4 years.
As for “low income families not knowing”, I’ve run across many middle and upper middle class families that don’t know either. It takes work. It takes getting involved. It takes going to programming that is available in all high schools across the country. Our school provides many free programs to help parents with scholarships, FAFSA’s, deadlines, test prep (many of which are free). They have designated meetings for freshman parents and give them a college timeline and have a night for junior parents to discuss all options for “Life After High School”. They bring in college admissions counselors to answer questions for parents and students. The best thing about all of these resources is that they are open to anyone. Even if you are not in the school district, you are free to attend. The sad reality is, they aren’t always very well attended. That blame shoud be placed squarely on the students and the parents, regardless of socio-economic status.
Those college-parent meetings are not universally available and I can imagine a lot of poor and working parents cannot take the time off from work/childcare to attend. Me? I work in the daytime and paid a babysitter. Our wealthy school district had a program that grew to having some parent event all 4 years by the end (though it didn’t start that way - even here it was mostly limited to senior year for a long time). The U in the study is in a pretty rural state, one that doesn’t have internet service available everywhere (it’s ranked 34th out of our 50), and of course if you can get it that costs money too.
I wouldn’t assume the things I have are available everywhere, or accessible to poorer families if they are.