Excuse my ignorance and lack of understanding on this topic. This is a question that has been haunting me since I learned of PBL. If schools like Cornell and LECOM-B have PBL for the first two years, what is the tuition paying for?? (yes, I did a search)
You can't look at one year's tuition vs. that one year's activities in classrooms. Your total four years of tuition cover a huge production that results in four years of med ed. You don't get to order off a menu.
I can't speak to Cornell's model, but I've thought long and hard about LECOM-B, which impresses the **** out of me with its frugality.
LECOM-B has brand new OMM and anatomy labs, which you don't get to skip over in PBL. There's a gigantic lecture hall, where you'll take biochem in a didactical model. There's a library, there's a cafeteria, there's a whole entire structure of the people who take care of admissions, financial aid, clinicals, accreditation, curriculum, etc. None of this is any different with PBL.
So if you want to compare the cost of a didactic model, say at Nova, with the PBL structure at LECOM, think about how a lecturer differs from a facilitator. In a lecture course, with 200 students, the lecturer has responsibility to present material for an hour, in addition to preparing that lecture and handling the administration of lectures and tests. If the lecturer is lucky, he/she has a staff that handles IT, test administration, copying handouts, and handling student questions. But lecturing a one-hour course that meets three times a week is about a 12 hour job. It's an overwhelming production, and if you take the total cost and divide by 200+ students, that's the number for PBL comparison.
By contrast, a PBL facilitator has less than a dozen students, with responsibilities that vastly outweigh the didactic lecturer. Assuming the clinical presentations are already figured out (pretty massive assumption), the facilitator has to pay attention to how and whether each student is keeping up. The students' decisions in which textbook chapters to assign themselves means that the facilitators are on the hook to be flexible and design exams that allow different PBL groups to be compared to each other, that are proportional to the total amount of material to be covered, and that prepare the students for boards. If you were doing this job vs. a lecturer job (you're a practicing DO), for which job would you be expected to be paid more?
So the physical plant and administrative overhead and liability insurance and accreditation burden and labs and curriculum and IT staff and security are the same, didactical vs. PBL. After all that's paid for, then there's a didactical staff vs. a PBL staff to pay for. Not much difference.
I am a FL resident and would love to stay in state, but am afraid to apply to a school where I am dependent on another person(s) having an impact on my education and grades.
You will have
nothing but dependencies on others, no matter which school you go to. But if you like having maximum control over your study time and your grades, then a PBL model is where you would find this. While the didactic students are sitting in lecture, under PBL it's just you, your textbook, and your destiny in your hands there in the library.
