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recessiontime

Joined: 21 Jun 2010 Location: Got avatar privileges nyahahaha
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Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 7:26 pm Post subject: |
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what fox said about the information age and pumping out more doctors is already happening in Australia. It's at the point already where many graduates are unsure whether they will have internship positions. Same with pharmacists as well.
Even in the US it's at a point where graduates all want to specialize because the pay for a GP is not very good anymore with nurse practitioners and physician assistants drivings costs down. |
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UknowsI

Joined: 16 Apr 2009
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Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 8:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
| silkhighway wrote: |
| If it's not a surgeon, why does it cost so much money for training? |
Because we demand doctors be over-educated. |
There is something I never quite understood about American medical school. I hear a lot about "pre-med" but I have no idea what it is. How long does people have to study before they start medical school? Is it a whole bachelor's degree? The easiest way to make medical education cheaper would be for students to go to medical school right after high school. In Scandinavia they start medical school right after high-school and the drop-out rate is generally very low. I can of course see other advantages of pre-med, but if it takes many years it might not be so efficient. |
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recessiontime

Joined: 21 Jun 2010 Location: Got avatar privileges nyahahaha
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Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 10:34 pm Post subject: |
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| UknowsI wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
| silkhighway wrote: |
| If it's not a surgeon, why does it cost so much money for training? |
Because we demand doctors be over-educated. |
There is something I never quite understood about American medical school. I hear a lot about "pre-med" but I have no idea what it is. How long does people have to study before they start medical school? Is it a whole bachelor's degree? The easiest way to make medical education cheaper would be for students to go to medical school right after high school. In Scandinavia they start medical school right after high-school and the drop-out rate is generally very low. I can of course see other advantages of pre-med, but if it takes many years it might not be so efficient. |
In both the US and Canada pre-med is a meaningless term. You can be a music or math major and get into medical school with the right courses and scores. Pre-med usually refers to people that are doing their undergrad in science (bio/chem/physics/etc) which cover the prerequisite courses for applying to medical school. Most pre-meds do not get into medical school because of the competitiveness. So Pre-med is just another way of saying "I'm doing a worthless degree but I have ambitions of getting into med school just like everybody else does."
As for relaxing standards, it's not happening in the US or Canada because of physician lobby groups and it's been like this since the early 80s. Instead they are pumping out NPs and PAs and giving them prescription rights to compensate for the artificial shortage of MDs. |
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silkhighway
Joined: 24 Oct 2010 Location: Canada
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Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 10:39 am Post subject: |
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Economist Steven Levitt was asked in a readers Q&A session on the freakonomics podcast if education today is still relevant. Here's the excerpt:
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DUBNER: A reader named Jonathan Bennett asks, �Is it true that college education is no longer a factor, or [is] even a disadvantage, when it comes to employment?� Levitt, what say you?
LEVITT: [laughs] I think that never has anyone made a statement more false than Jonathan Bennett�s statement that education would be no help or a disadvantage in the modern economy. Of all the topics that economists have studied, I would say one we are most certain about are the returns to education. And the numbers that people have come up with over and over are that every extra year of education that you get will translate into an 8 percent increase in earnings over your lifetime. So someone who graduated from college will earn about 30 percent more on average than someone who only graduated from high school. And if anything, the returns to education have gotten larger over time. They�re as big as they have ever been.
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 11:06 am Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| Aren't there debt-clearing programs for public service or NGO jobs in medicine? There are in law. 10 years of consecutive public service or even private non-profit work and your debt is wiped clean. |
Yes. The 10 years of public service applies to ALL student loans, doesn't matter what field you studied.
There are other programs in medicine too. For instance a friend of a friend is doing his residency right now and plans to be a GP. He will be one in a rural MN town for a few years and the state will pay off his remaining debt. |
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Hugo85
Joined: 27 Aug 2010
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Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 2:03 pm Post subject: |
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| recessiontime wrote: |
| UknowsI wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
| silkhighway wrote: |
| If it's not a surgeon, why does it cost so much money for training? |
Because we demand doctors be over-educated. |
There is something I never quite understood about American medical school. I hear a lot about "pre-med" but I have no idea what it is. How long does people have to study before they start medical school? Is it a whole bachelor's degree? The easiest way to make medical education cheaper would be for students to go to medical school right after high school. In Scandinavia they start medical school right after high-school and the drop-out rate is generally very low. I can of course see other advantages of pre-med, but if it takes many years it might not be so efficient. |
In both the US and Canada pre-med is a meaningless term. You can be a music or math major and get into medical school with the right courses and scores. Pre-med usually refers to people that are doing their undergrad in science (bio/chem/physics/etc) which cover the prerequisite courses for applying to medical school. Most pre-meds do not get into medical school because of the competitiveness. So Pre-med is just another way of saying "I'm doing a worthless degree but I have ambitions of getting into med school just like everybody else does."
As for relaxing standards, it's not happening in the US or Canada because of physician lobby groups and it's been like this since the early 80s. Instead they are pumping out NPs and PAs and giving them prescription rights to compensate for the artificial shortage of MDs. |
Except in Quebec.
The selection for medicine is done during CEGEP (we do one less year of high school and one less of university and do a 2 year pre-university school). All students across the province get a R grade and this grade pretty much determines where and in what you can get admitted to. For example, if you have 30 (this is out of 50) you know that you cannot get into medicine, pharmacy, dentistry or optometry, but can get into every other program at any university in Quebec.
It also makes it insanely hard to apply abroad for undergrad, but that's besides the point. |
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Ramen
Joined: 15 Apr 2008
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Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 5:06 pm Post subject: |
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best thing for a new doctor to do is file for bankruptcy before actual practice.  |
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Space Bar
Joined: 20 Oct 2010
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Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2011 12:10 am Post subject: |
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| UknowsI wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
| silkhighway wrote: |
| If it's not a surgeon, why does it cost so much money for training? |
Because we demand doctors be over-educated. |
There is something I never quite understood about American medical school. I hear a lot about "pre-med" but I have no idea what it is. How long does people have to study before they start medical school? Is it a whole bachelor's degree? The easiest way to make medical education cheaper would be for students to go to medical school right after high school. In Scandinavia they start medical school right after high-school and the drop-out rate is generally very low. I can of course see other advantages of pre-med, but if it takes many years it might not be so efficient. |
It's that way in Mexico, too. So you have many American college grads who could not get into med school in the states studying beside kids right out of HS. And those guys eventually end up being on a par with their Dr. Gringo counterparts. (And then the Americans have to do an extra year to come back to the states, so five extra years in total!) |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2011 5:29 am Post subject: |
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| Ramen wrote: |
best thing for a new doctor to do is file for bankruptcy before actual practice.  |
You can't shed student loans via bankruptcy. You're stuck with them forever. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:09 am Post subject: |
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| Ramen wrote: |
best thing for a new doctor to do is file for bankruptcy before actual practice.  |
Yeah, right. This is exactly the problem: a very small, very small, number of law students who studied bankruptcy tried this. And then Congress amended the bankruptcy laws to exclude student loans from dischargeable debt. I guess Congress didn't trust the bankruptcy courts to do their jobs and ferret out the cases of bad faith bankruptcies. |
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