In chatting with my nephew who is in medical school over the weekend, he brought up a point of which I had been unaware. Medical schools have strong incentives to grant degrees to any student they actually accept into medical school, regardless of the individual’s suitability to the profession or skills. Very, very few students transfer into medical schools and, because of the way medical schools are organized, they don’t expand next year’s entering class to make up for dropouts. That means that the revenue that a student who leaves the program would mean is lost to the school.
Essentially, he was saying that the only people who don’t come out of a medical degree program with a medical degree are those who drop out. Cheering thought.
Isn’t this exactly like our elite schools? The vaunted importance of Harvard, for example, does not derive so much from the excellent teaching and learning that goes on there during four wasted years so much as from the recognition that anyone who managed to get into Harvard has to be smart and has to have proven himself as such in high school. That’s why it’s so easy to drop out of Harvard without losing anything, as did Bill Gates.
More important to American education than Harvard, probably, are the trade schools, which regularly turn sows’ ears into silk purses. I’d love to see the results of a Harvard professor’s attempts to function in a trade school!