<p>I've observed that a whole lot of college-bound students, and even high school freshies have their hearts and aspiration set on pre-med/pre-law (and other pre-?) ...... then come tumbling down when their GPA don't cut it.</p>
<p>Is this a significant portion of the college-bound applicants?</p>
<p>How do they deal with the setback?</p>
<p>Is this a social problem? Is this healthy?</p>
<p>I would suggest that an aspiring medical school student (note that I don’t say “aspiring doctor,” in case s/he doesn’t make the cut after s/he’s admitted to medical school) major in something else in college while taking the necessary prerequisites for medical school (biology, chemistry, physics, calculus, etc.). That way, they can simoltaneously major in something else they are interested in, have a back-up option in case they decide to quit medical school, and nevertheless have all of the prerequisite courses out of the way.</p>
<p>Then again, even the biology majors who don’t make it to medical school (or out of medical school) can still find jobs in biology-related careers, although not necessarily as easily as students holding other types of degrees.</p>
<p>I’ve been at college tours when half the participants raise their hands and identify themselves as premed. There isn’t a “prelaw” major, but I’ve also been at college tours when participants identify themselves as prelaw. At college fairs and at admitted students’ days, the premed tables are always jammed. And there are numerous high school kids who post on the law and medical boards asking questions because they anticipate that they will be applying to med/law schools in 4 years.</p>
<p>The numbers of students who actually get to med school (especially right out of college) are slim. These students are taken from numerous majors, not just the formal premed students. When looking at admissions rates that correlate to top colleges (10%-20% of applicants), and thousands of applicants for each spot in med school, the odds of success are clearly daunting.</p>
<p>A higher percentage may get into law school because of the number of law schools. With the glut of lawyers that isn’t necessarily a good career goal these days. As a successful lawyer of 30+ years with one kid going to law school next year, I can positively say that this is often a highly over-rated career choice. </p>
<p>Schools and chat boards warn high school students about the premed weed-out classes, such as organic chem. Put 80 premed kids in an organic chem class, all of them smart and believing that they are capable of handling the work, and do the math to figure out how many will actually get As and A-s if that class is graded on a curve? </p>
<p>How many kids also are willing to commit to building their resumes for med school? It may mean spending nights in a research lab instead of going to parties, or hanging out in the dorm, or building houses in New Orleans instead of spending Spring Break at the beach. How many kids actually focus on that med school application from year 1 of college?</p>
<p>How many kids will be so overburdened with debt from undergrad work that they simply can’t afford grad school?</p>
<p>Of course, saying that you’re premed or prelaw sounds good. It makes parents happy. Some students actually accomplish this, and we all need to have dreams. In a way, this may equate to football. Lots of high school players. Some of those players continue to play in college (D1, D2, D3, intramurals). Few make it all the way to the NFL, but some might play Arena Football (chiropractor, DO, etc.).</p>
<p>I’ve been at college presentations where the Admissions Office has warned that 80% of students change their majors. It shouldn’t be traumatic when a high school student changes plans, either before or after the weed out classes. Certain majors are notorious for changes of heart, including engineering and premed. Sometimes the parents are more more traumatized by the loss of their dream for their children, than the student themselves.</p>
<p>Personally, I encouraged my kids to consider majors that would offer employment opportunities out of college whether or not they went to grad school. I came from an immigrant background, however, where getting a good-paying job was valued more than “knowledge for the sake of learning.” I’m sure that colors my view.</p>
<p>Thanks Neonzeus.</p>
<p>Your comments were very much what I had only suspected initially. I started the thread in hope of beginning a discussion that will warn starry-eyed students about “the dream”, that it is indeed mostly just a dream.</p>
<p>I also suspect that most pre-med/pre-law students don’t really “know” they want to be in medical school, they just think they do. As you said, it’s somewhat like a medallion or tag you hang on your body to glorify yourself and make parents happy.</p>
<p>The social prestige attached to being a lawyer or doctor has definitely clouded the decision-making process, preventing students from identifying their true strengths.</p>
<p>At the elite colleges about 20% eventually end up going to Med school and about 30 to 40% eventually end up going to law school. Most top school students find a home somewhere after they graduate. The law/med percentage then declines to much smaller totals at the less elite schools.This makes emininent sense since these jobs afford the protection of a state issued license that other jobs requiring high levels of education such as engineering or corporate management do not.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about most, but this was more or less true for me when I entered college.</p>
<p>After my freshman year, I decided that I didn’t want it after all (even though my freshman grades were actually pretty good). So I did something else instead. I wouldn’t say it was particularly traumatic or unhealthy or anything. It did mean some floundering while I figured out what I wanted to do, but I had to figure that out at some point (and it probably wouldn’t have been in high school even had I not been in the pre-med pigeonhole, because my interests changed a lot). Better than realizing halfway through med school that I was living in denial about whether I actually wanted this career that I had spent so much time and money working toward.</p>
<p>High schools in the US don’t do enough career exposure for students. If you went just on what college freshmen came in majoring to start off, you’d think that the only possibilities in this world were doctor, lawyer, teacher, nurse, “business person” or engineer. </p>
<p>I’d say that only about 15 to 20% of the people who start out pre-med actually ever apply to med school. Only about 1/2 of those people will get accepted. But once you’re in, the graduation rates for med school are over >98%. </p>
<p>Law school admissions are very different, and the failure/quit rates are certainly higher.</p>
<p>In my experience, many students change their major from their first choice. Some of this comes from difficulty in making the grade, some from changes in what the working world demands <a href=“many%20times%20a%20shortage%20becomes%20a%20surplus%20as%20a%20flood%20of%20new%20engineers/lawyers/etc.%20come%20out%20of%20schools,%20and%20students%20shift%20to%20meet%20demand%20in%20other%20fields”>i</a>*, some from discovery that they plain do not like the field they originally chose, and some from peer pressure.</p>
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<p>I’ve seen crazy stats like this too. At Duke, 30% of the incoming class identifies as premed. Senior year, only 30% of that original 30% still identifies as premed LOL.</p>
<p>Yeah, it is really scary, and part of the reason I have actually moved away from pre-med, and I am going to college this fall! I think it also kind of sucks because the people who want to go pre-med, and do not cut in terms of grade get fairly hurt for other careers because of the difficulty of these courses. I heard other statistics like around 50% of JHU freshman state they are pre-med and only about like 15% are at the end, and a massive decrease at Cornell as well. People don’t realize it, but colleges are forced to put such difficult curves for pre-med courses because it lowers the prestige of students if there is such a high percentage of pre-med applicants each year.</p>
<p>
Actually the odds of success are not that daunting if you see the process all the way thru. “thousands of applicants for each spot in med school” is an extreme exaggeration. There are many applicants for each spot because people applying for med school apply to many schools, but nowhere near “thousands”. The admit rate runs in cycles based on how the economy was doing when the applicants entered college, ranging from a high of more than 1/2 of all applicants getting in to a low of about 1/3. I suspect that given the economy the admit rates the next few years may set a new low, dropping close to 1/4.</p>
<p>As for the “weed-out” classes and the curve, again I beg to disagree. Have you ever looked at the distribution of scores for tests in class like o-chem? It’s a rhetorical question, because the answer is sure to be “no”. The curve isn’t splitting students who have pretty much the same ability into arbitrary categories of A, B, and C. The difference between A- and B+, maybe, but anyone who’s actually seen real data as opposed to speculating what it must show knows that some students get it and many don’t. And the reason, ironically enough, come in the poster’s next paragraph. I think most people in these classes have the raw intelligence to succeed if they wanted to. The issue is it takes a lot of time and dedication to do well in these tough classes. When the rubber hits the road, many find they prefer hanging out with their friends and enjoying the pleasures of college instead of haunting the library.</p>
<p>Many of the other points made in this thread are quite valid, however. Claiming “pre-med” gives some prestige, and college students know far too little about the jobs available once they graduate. Hence the dominance of pre-med, pre-law, etc. I’d guess investment banker is less popular now than a few years ago.
Oh really? Care to suggest some specific jobs these people can find?</p>
<p>There may be lots of job possibilities in this world but the jobs that will prove to provide a consistent and high income, that have to be done in the United States, that have high barriers to entry and that will allow you to establish professional roots without having to move several times over the course of a career have the initials MD, JD, DDS and CPA.
I would even advise a son or daughter going into business with an MBA to obtain a CPA license to establish job securing state licensure. The elite college crowd who pursue MDs and JDs are not fools for doing so.</p>
<p>I stand by my “thousands of applicants for each spot in med school.” All you have to do is look at US News & Word Report, any “How to Get into Med School” book, or the web site of any med school.</p>
<p>Just to take one example, Temple School of Medicine reported in 2008:</p>
<p>Number of applications: 9,745
Number interviewed: 947
Number matriculated: 182</p>
<p>There is nothing ‘entrapping’ about being pre-law. Law students come from a huge variety of backgrounds, everything from poli sci to rhetoric, literature, history, art and yes, even the sciences & math.</p>
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You can stand by it, but you’re just plain wrong. </p>
<p>Lets call this “math for lawyers” and use the statistics you just gave.<br>
Q. If 9,745 applicants apply for 182 spots, how many applicants are there for each spot?
**A.**To find the number of applicants per spot, divide the number of applicants by the number of spots. 9,745/182 = approximately 54.</p>
<p>54 is about a order of magnitude (factor of 10) less than “thousands”, no? And the actual odds of getting in are better than that; It’s virtually certain that to enroll (the big word for enroll is “matriculate”) 182 students they had to admit more than 182. Which means the odds of getting in to this 1 school are even better than 1 in 54.</p>
<p>OK - I acknowledge the odds are better than 1,000 to 1 for the final med school applicants, vs. the numbers who start out as premed. (You know what they say about lawyers - if we could do math, we would have become doctors.) In my right-brained legal world, though, 54 or 44 or 34 to 1 still seems like lousy odds for applicants. </p>
<p>One of my kids is planning on applying to med school after finishing an advanced degree in a health care field, so I’m actually rooting for the dreamers.</p>
<p>All I have to say to all the future med school applicants is:</p>
<p>Good luck paying off your student loans if ObamaCare gets passed. You’ll be a government employee with way lower wages than what docs make now. And it doesn’t matter what your specialty is (neonatal, brain surgeon, etc.)…you’ll all get paid the same. My good friend’s dad, who’s made a killing off of his practice for like 20 years, told me outright the other day that he’s quitting/retiring the day ObamaCare gets passed. His annual salary will probably get cut in half if he stays.</p>
<p>All I’m saying is, more and more smart kids will start looking to other professions once medicine becomes more work than it’s worth.</p>
<p>Viva la lawyers!</p>
<p>^^ Good luck with law. There’s so many of them out there that unless you are from HYS, Columbia, or another elite school, you’re basically screwed and/or making only 40-50k a year.</p>
<p>^ There will never be a surplus of lawyers. Never. Recessions and bad economic times only drive UP the demand for lawyers, and if you’re good, you have tons of job security.</p>
<p>And there’s practically no point in going to any law school outside the top 5 or 10 anyway, so why bother? Yale’s the one in my sights at the moment…</p>
<p>^^
Do realize that every aspiring lawyer’s dream schools are in the top 10.
In this day and age, there is truly a large large excess of lawyers. I know of two friends who graduated from ok-ish law schools (top 20) that are now looking for jobs in fields outside of law because of how hard it is to get them.</p>
<p>The big law firms aren’t exactly opening up more and more spots for students every year and will probably at most select the handful of top students from harvard, yale, etc. and leave the rest of the student bodies, yes even those from harvard, yale, etc. to small firms that pay pretty little and/or to start-up their own firms, which usually takes a while to make little money.</p>