...I also have a question. If in caribbean schools you can just "get a MD degree simply by breathing and writing a tuition check?", why are the attrition rates so high? Are that many people dying (no longer breathing)? Because if so that really would be a story.
The argument that caribs take students who shouldn't be admitted, take their money, and then kick them out after 2 semesters is a valid point. You can definitely argue this is not OK and should be stopped. But at the same time you can not claim that they are just diploma mills...
To be fair, you really shouldn't conflate Carib med schools with just the big 4. There are something like 40-50 Carib med schools. Many do actually let you graduate without passing the steps and many are sending the majority of their graduates back to the US with nothing but loans.
Fortunately those schools don't cost nearly as much as the big 4, which cost as much or more than US schools.
Please don't use big words like fulminate, my feeble caribbean educated mind can't handle it. You were the one who called me a "shill," which is funny because you fit that description much more than I do.
Who cares, Ross/SGU are not in the United States, so therefore are not under the purview of LCME/COCA. You're still missing the point.
They fill a different role than US schools, and therefore should not be judged in the same manner. They let people prove that they are capable by actually going through medical school, whereas the US medical education system largely does not. There are only enough spots in US schools for the people who have already proven they have the tools to be competent physicians. While it would be great if this system was robust enough to fulfill the needs of the US residency system, it is not, being off by ~6000 graduates.
The US residency system (at this point in time at least), requires that people go to the caribbean to prove their worth. And while some people fail out and are saddled with debt, which totally sucks, thousands of people do not and go on to be competent physicians. And this is regardless of what you might think of the quality of their residency program (which as I have already pointed out, you have no qualifications to judge, seeing as you are not a physician and have no clinical training)
So no, caribbean schools are not the best option. But they are certainly a reasonable option for thousands of people. You repeatedly expunge a false narrative, and should be called out for doing so.
Graduating from a big 4 school gives you some shot if you apply to 150-200 programs. The thing is it would be one thing if more than half the people that took out loans and started at those schools ended up in a GME. The thing is they don't. I know enough people from Ross, AUC and SGU to know that's relatively accurate.
I think it's safe to say that any school that charges so much for tuition to the point that most students take loans with a premise of fulfilling a lifelong dream, yet at the same time knowingly accepts people that simply wouldn't make it is acting irresponsibly at best.
If you can manage to make it out of one of the Big 4 and match, my hats off to you. You've done something half the people don't.
I don't think the education is terrible, but the support really is. Obviously education has to fulfill some minimums in order to maintain accreditation for licensure in all 50 states. Honestly, I have many friends who've done it and I know a fair amount of Carib MD docs. After training in the US, most are just as good as the average US MD. But that doesn't make what the for-profit Carib schools do righteous. They're not fulfilling a need, they're lining their pockets by accepting people they know can't make it.
If the goal was to truly give students a chance at fulfilling their dreams, they could easily do it by increasing admission standards and making sure most of their matriculants graduate and place into GME (i.e. what US medical schools do).
Ok I'll try one more time with those charts. Yes, the preferred specialty thing only adds ~5% to the match statistics. But that still does not paint an accurate picture of first-time match success for US-IMGs.
If you look further into the data, the mean time since graduation for the unmatched cohort of US-IMGs is 5.7 years. This means that the majority of US-IMGs that don't match aren't "fresh" graduates, they have been out of school for an average of 6 years.
There is absolutely a small cohort of caribbean grads who manage to graduate from school but are so bad that they can't get a residency position. Those people continue to apply every year, so the number builds up and actually becomes substantial.
If you want to include all the previous year's graduates that are still applying for the match to discuss yearly match rates (which is what the NRMP data reports do), then you should also include all the people from those previous years who did match (which the NRMP data reports do not).
As I've stated, the match rate for first-time applicants from Ross last year was 86%. I would not categorize this as plenty bad, as it is only 8% lower than the US MD average, and higher than the 77% US DO average.
You're making the same error that you claim they make with regards to DOs. The only group that is separated into graduates and seniors in the NRMP match report is US MD. The DO match rates include previous graduates also.
I would argue that a self-sustaining percentage of graduates that continue not to match year after year demonstrates that even if the number is smaller, it's still significant. I mean it's not like the average unmatched AMG goes through 10 matches, many even take an initial year off because they are off-cycle (that's what happens when a school starts at 3 different times in a year) and others are busy preparing things like the PTAL before they even apply. I know very few IMGs that attempt the match more than 4-5 times (in fact I think there may be a limit on it).
And are you getting that first-time match number from the school or the NRMP? If it's the latter, I'd like to see it. If it's the former, I'd say you're taking info from a source that has an even greater vested interest in manipulating the data than the individual you are advising people not to take advice from because of his vested interest.
Also, please be sure to differentiate match rate from GME placement rate. The two are not synonymous, despite what many med schools seem to think.
just see this thread... http://forums.studentdoctor.net/thr...c-medicine-not-using-medicine-at-all.1125682/
