@blugrn6, I’m just curious, do they still have degrees like Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Communication Studies still available to BA/MD students? I know many students don’t do them just because of the amount of credit hours you have to come in with and now students have semester credit hour caps and can’t take undergrad classes with Structure Function. But one of my friends who did Child and Adolescent Psychiatry loved her Psychology courses and her degree but that kind of made sense in her circumstance.
What’s good about Bio and Chem (at least the way it used to be which you had) is that after Year 1 you could leave the program and still be right on track for the traditional premed route. For Psychology, if you realized med school was just too much, you could use your Psychology bachelor’s (although a much more expensive one) and go for a Doctorate in Psychology, if you wanted to be a clinical psychologist. A Liberal Arts degree by itself isn’t a useful degree (a.k.a. you’ll be unemployed), so if you leave the program in some way, you pretty much paid med school tuition for a useless Bachelor’s.
Part of the problem if you do any degree other than Liberal Arts at UMKC, is the schedule restrictions and you have so much other stuff on your plate - i.e. USMLE Step 1, that you don’t have time to be poring over 300/400 level classes during campus since they take much more work which takes away from studying. So many of us just chose the Liberal Arts degree because it was so much more malleable. We jokingly call the BLA, the the “B**** Lazy A**” degree, since it has one of the few hours for a degree in the entire university.