Probably beating a dead horse but you have to admit, it’s adults abusing young people for money. Should this even be legal to do?
Cite the other countries that you see are doing it right? Do you understand their admission criteria? Their education pathways? Their selectivity? % of students able to access a degree?
I see med school as a whole different animal. MD earnings are not the same in the USA as they are in other countries that might look at med school as almost a vocation, like UHC countries.
A quick Google search away, my friend. No offense.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-with-free-college/
The AMA. American medical association tries to protect the $ interests of current US doctors who spent a decade getting thru med school. Should be 3 years of med school and a year of practicum. That’s it. Not 8-10 years. Would increase the number of doctors and reduce healthcare costs.
This is a debate, I have to agree that there are some countries that offer the said program way cheaper than the ones in the USA. I feel like it is cheaper to study medicine in Asian countries.
The US schools charge what they do because people are willing to pay it, even those from other countries. If China or Spain or England offer a better program at a cheaper cost, by all means go there.
And there are plenty of schools in the US that are as cheap as schools around the world, but they aren’t considered elite. People would rather pay more for what they consider a superior product.
I think medical schools will start offering free tuition like NYU does. The 60 Minutes piece explaining how and why they decided to do that was very interesting. The other elite med schools will do the same, and once Harvard does it the other Ivies will follow, then Duke and Stanford…slippery slope started by NYU.
The US college system and rest of the world really aren’t comparable for many reasons.
Remember the EU and other countries that offer ‘free’ tuition have completely different offerings than US colleges and that overall tax burdens tend to be higher at least in EU.
EU unis are typically 3 years not 4, have relatively few gen-ed requirements (e.g., no writing, or multi subject exposure), there is generally no on campus housing or food service, there’s relatively little programming (speakers, concerts, clubs), no mental health services, limited advising (academic, pre-professional), no fitness facilities, and no athletic teams…really a very different college experience.
Lastly many of the countries with ‘free’ tuition have a lower proportion of college educated population than the US as well. Per the OECD as of 2018, the US% of 25-64 year olds who have completed college is 47%, Germany 29%, Denmark 28%, Finland 45%, Poland 30.0%.
There are advantages and disadvantages to every system, if you like one better, there is often the opportunity to attend.
The high cost of a medical school education is offset by the incredibly high return in the form of postgraduate earnings. I don’t think many 60-year old physicians regret their career choice because medical school was too expensive.
Perhaps an unintended consequence of free (or super low-priced) medical school might be lowered salaries for medical professionals. While some medical professionals are driven solely by their desire to aid others, many others are driven by their desire to earn a large paycheck. Not that there is anything wrong with pursuing a career because one wishes to earn money.
Why does US college education cost more?
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We provide a more luxurious (some would say, wasteful) college experience;
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Similar to healthcare, we price the product based on what people can pay (or borrow), rather than try to minimize the cost, resulting in higher cost, including administrative cost, across the board;
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Again, similar to healthcare, we don’t subsidize nearly as much as other developed countries, even though higher education serves a national purpose; and
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We don’t ration and try to send nearly everyone to college (unnecessarily, some would argue).
The US also doesn’t track students for college in early grades and dictate who can and cannot attend university.
There are plenty of scholarships for hard working students, just not at the schools most people are looking for on CC.
There is also no one forcing anyone to attend a high cost college in the US.
Health care is a business in the US, whereas in most other developed countries it is usually considered to be a government backed service. Schools charge accordingly, depending on the country.
Canada has many similarities in culture to the US, but it differs quite drastically in how it delivers medical care to the public.
U of MN Med school fees - MN resident 39K USD / Non res 56K USD
U of CHI(Pritzker) - 55K USD
McGill (MDCM)- Quebec Res 8K / CAN res 19K / Non CAN 45K
Canadian dollar was somewhere around .75 USD, last I looked.
In most developed countries, public universities are publicly subsidized. To make matters more complex, there are two levels of public funding in the US: federal and state. The US moved away from the public funding model toward an individual (tuition-based or endowment-based) funding, with a sharp decrease in public funding/increase in individual contribution after the 2008 crisis.
It’s a choice that can be reversed at any time. There was widespread support for public university funding from post WW2 throughout the “baby boom” years.
For instance, when Pell grants were created, they covered the full cost of tuition, fees, room, and board at a public university. Now, often, Pell grants don’t cover even tuition for a commuter at a local public university.
Then again, some costs have risen: cinder block housing with everything nailed down and communal bathrooms is not imaginable for kids who’ve grown up with their own room and their own bathroom (remember when kids shared a room and the whole family shared one bathroom? What was normal then isn’t now.)
Mental health has become a real concern, and accomodations now exist for kids who used to be dismissed as either lazy or stupid. This costs money.
Other developed countries don’t have campuses. They don’t offer housing, gyms, health centers, tutoring. There’s typically universal health care so anything health related is not the college’s business. Classes are sink or swim - there aren’t any tutors. Nor are there functional career centers at many universities (not all).
The university that follows this “use the town you’re in” model is Minerva.
https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-education.htm
Finally, wrt restricting access: this is less and less true. Other countries are catching up or even the US has been caught when it comes to degree holders in the 34 and under group. It’s started to fall around 2010/2011, relative to other countries.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cac.asp
Relevant sentence: " In 2000, the rate of attainment of any postsecondary degree among 25- to 34-year-olds in the United States was 12 percentage points higher than the OECD average; by 2017, this gap had decreased to 3 percentage points."
Other developed countries don’t offer gyms, health centers, housing, or tutoring? C’mon now. It’s there, in one form or another.
It depends. British and Irish universities have active Student Unions and “halls” for first-years.
But French, German, Italian, Finnish… universities rely on the city they’re in. Students go to the doctor’s or health center in town. They use the town’s sports clubs. If they want tutors, they must look for them and pay for them. They live with their parents and commute, or share an apartment and commute, or live in a studio in town, or sometimes in private student residences. Often, there’s no “campus”, but rather a group of buildings in the city, with major streets and few pedestrian areas (very rarely a “quad”). The buildings may be set in the same neighborhood loosely linked by common subjects… or may be a 30mn tram ride apart
However, the 60 year old physicians attended medical school 35-39 years ago when it was less expensive (inflation adjusted). In 1980, private medical school tuition was about $10k (equivalent to $33k now), while (presumably in-state) public medical school tuition was about $3k (equivalent to $10k now); see https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.7.2.144 (exhibit 11; note the rapid rise in tuition starting in the late 1970s).
Note that in Canada, many of the “flagship” and other universities are in heavily populated metro areas, so that many students can live at home and commute (and many do), even though they also have dorms for students coming from sparsely populated parts of the province or country where there are no nearby universities.
There are some US states like Arizona that have similar population distributions that allow having just a few universities to put a very large percentage of the population in commuting range.