nobody knows what will happen in the future - but what we DO know is that the # of residency slots will approximate the # of AMG graduates as of 2016. That is what we know NOW. Yes that might change. It might not. But you anyone in their right mind should tell someone to exercise extreme caution in going anywhere outside the US for medicine because things may not change, and so far not signs of things changing have arisen - in fact, programs are cutting slots.
I agree. My issue, as I had stated in another thread before, was with the manner in which people go about these "warnings" they give. It's one thing to say, "it is in one's best interest to pursue all alternative options because the future prospects for CMGs does not appear to be on the bright side." Compare that to: if you go to a Carib school, you're screwed, you might as well take out a 300k loan and burn it...
I guess it's a message board so in reality I shouldn't get irritated with the tone people use, but human nature I guess?
you forget that is incredibly difficult to be above average. Thats why average is average.
Its not easy to make yourself a superior candidate compared to an AMG, this is especially true for people who struggled to achieve well academically in undergraduate classes and MCAT - part of the reason of why they are in the Caribbean in the first place. Just so there is not a flame war - i do know there are a number of grads who had similar "stats" as AMGs, and for whatever reason went south, but the great majority of Caribbean grads are not like that.
I'm aware of the difficulty. Again, I think it's just the tone people take which indirectly attempts to say, "well in all likelihood, if you had to go to the caribbean, you probably aren't bright enough to do well on the step 1 or in medical school in general." If a student was a dance major and got a 4.0 in college including the pre-reqs, but took no upper level courses, is that person necessarily more prepped to succeed than a person who only got a 3.1, but was a Physiology major? I just say that meaning straight numbers don't tell a whole story (even though generalizations typically hold true) and there are many unique circumstances that lead people to go the carib route.
You are probably right on the last sentence. That happens at every division. TOP 10 school vs non-ranked, american vs Carribbean, probably top 4 carribbean vs other carribbean. The reason people are interested because it SIGNIFICANTLy affects AMGs as well. They are getting less and less choice each match regarding location preference and likely specialty as well.
I understand that. But there really is no lower tier bashing here, i.e. don't go to blahblah state school, it's a no-name school and you'll never match in to plastics if you go. Further, other threads that actually discuss the residency issue discuss articles and what the recent changes have been and thoughts on them in a civilized matter as opposed to, "whelp, that just means you can't go to any lower-tier schools now unless you want to do family practice." If it's involving a carib school though, all hell breaks loose.
Read the articles. Around 670 matched, around 940 people graduated this year. So about a third of their class is doing...something besides starting residency this year in the US.
The second link you posted notes the fact that the graduation is inclusive of all the MD receiving students. The first link only referred to US students (or possibly inclusive of Canadians) getting spots in the US. There were 940 students total, so if we were to say that this last year's SGU demographics are anything similar to the 2012 class, only ~2/3... or 627 of those students were from the US. By that number, the match rate for SGU was 93.5% for its US students. I haven't seen an actual number posted by the school, but this sounds much closer to the 80 something % number I saw floating around somewhere before.
