If the school wants to be accredited though it has to produce students who pass the boards.
As an aside, do you think for-profit medical schools might create an competitive marketplace where school A can charge more than school B because its students have higher board scores/match results.
Caribbean schools takes a lot of students who do NOT pass the boards yet people still go there, because it offers them a chance to become doctors. I'm not sure I like the reputation that school produces which is known to take a lot of students, charge a lot of money, and hang them out to dry when they end up not passing their boards. Look at law school which does this....there are many Third Tier law schools which charge a lot of money but churn out law students who don't pass the bar and end up unemployed. In fact, when law schools began to proliferate, one of things that started to happen was the image of unemployed lawyers began to pop up. Everyone could get into law school now, but not everyone could live as one.
I hope that Rocky Vista does not start a rush into creation of such a system. At the very least, there should be standards of accreditation which stipulates that the vast majority (90%+) must match successfully. At least in that case, we won't be in danger of seeing a proliferation of medical schools with low standards and high tuition.
As for creating a more competitive marketplace....I seriously doubt it, mainly because the places with the highest scores/match results are not always the most expensive. The most expensive medical schools are filled those private schools which are 'unranked' (Tufts, Boston med etc). Not to say that they are bad, but according to US News, schools like UofChicago, WashU, Cornell etc do not have students coming out with the most debt, even though they typically the highest board scores/best match results. One of the reasons is that those schools can offer their students more scholarships. Hence, the most competitive schools are currently not the most expensive.
With a for-profit school...I'm not sure the marketplace for education will work out that way since there is already an established hierarchy in medicine.
People will still aim for the Harvard/Yale/Stanford, and keep the newest med school in the back, especially given the 'stigma' of being a for-profit school.
I've seen this in China when the gov't decided to allow for private 'for profit' schools to proliferate. To this day, 15 years after the deregulation of the educational system, the best schools are still the public schools---the oldest ones with the longest reputation---i.e the government schools.
Private schools there tend to be all for-profit, and has a reputation of being a place of 'last resort' for wealthy kids who do not test into a government (i.e "good") school. And because private schools cannot always attract the best students, they tend to see lower test scores. That is starting to change as some private schools, with the best resources, start attracting better students, but progress has been slow.
I'm going to stick my head out and say that this will happen with the creation and possible proliferation of for-profit medical schools in this country.
rg
