Domain: aamc.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to aamc.org.
Comments · 22
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Re: Does not logically follow
Show us those places then ami.
Well, there is the USA.
http://fortune.com/2017/12/21/...
https://news.aamc.org/press-re... -
Re:Male-ness is a Secondary Characteristic
To speak to the nursing, the greater problem presented in that industry tends to be that there are more practicing male MDs than female MDs with females being weeded out and eventually going into nursing. So, it gets spun from "not enough males in nursing" to "women get forced out of MDs and over-saturate nursing".
That's not what's happening. Medical schools are admitting as many women as men now. https://www.aamc.org/newsroom/...
The route to medical school and nursing school are completely different. They draw different people.
Medical school is a much more intensive course, with more years of clinical training. Most medical students that I know come from upper-class families, where their parents could send them to top K-12 and undergraduate schools, and as we know, family income is the factor most strongly associated with school performance. I know doctors who didn't have loans because their parents could pay their tuition and expenses in cash.
Nursing school is shorter and less intense. Nurses are more often working-class. It's less expensive (that is, more attainable) and the payback time on your investment is shorter. It's less competitive. It's also easier to take time off from your career and come back. It's less of a career commitment.
Most nurses I meet are pretty smart. Nurses catch doctors in mistakes. Some of them manage departments, go into research, get PhDs, MBAs, law degrees, etc. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to manage an operating room?) But it's a different career track.
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Most guys here are missing the point.
And that point is encapsulated in a single adverb: still. "Still" is what makes this news; it wouldn't have been news twenty or thirty years ago.
I am old enough to remember when genital equipment was considered employment destiny. When my wife went to oceanography graduate school the sysadmins of the school minicomputers were all female. The all-male faculty called them -- I kid you not -- "Data Dollies". Data dolly was considered a good job for a technically inclined woman because it paid well for an entry level job, involved computers, and was an easy job to hand off when you quit to marry the professor you'd snagged. Plus they'd have a hard time getting work in industry. Clearly that was a transitional moment because there were a substantial minority of women graduate students in the program, but *no* female professors, much less senior administrators.
But given the strong cohort of women in that class, it is surprising the thirty years later there is still a lingering perception in this country that science isn't for women. But maybe it shouldn't be surprising. Change doesn't happen instantaneously, nor does it necessarily ever become complete. When I was in college the notion that women had to become full time homemakers was still predominant -- not among students, but of people over thirty or so, practically everyone in positions of hiring and authority. That attitude seems weird and foreign to a young person today; I expect it's hard for a young person to grasp how pervasive and indeed how genuinely oppressive that belief was. It's a bit like the difference between the way I experience watching Mad Men and the way my kids do. I actually *recognize* that world where smoking was everywhere, big shots drank during office hours, and "womanizing" was a word people actually used without irony. It was fading fast, but still there. To my kids it's like an alien civilization in Doctor Who. So yes, the news that many Americans see science as a profession that somehow belongs to men is a bit like discovering a Silurian in the closet.
The women of my generation fought hard to establish a beachhead in male dominated professions, and if they're sometimes a bit snippy about it, well they earned the right. It wasn't easy to be an oddball among your peers and freak to your parents, teachers and and people in authority generally. And this was at a time when there was no such thing as geek chic to offset the disadvantages being an oddball. Being a geek was bad, period.
Now that cadre of pioneering women is at or approaching the apex of their careers. They're still a minority in their age cohort, but they left a wide open hole in their wake for the next generation. It's taken awhile for that hole to fill up because when opportunities open for a group they go for more high-profile professions (47% of medical students are women, as are 48% of law students). But in another generation I am sure the view that science belongs to one sex or another will be a truly fringe belief.
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Oh God! Staticians ...
The tech consultant couldn’t understand why it was starting to seem so hard to find a date. So he crunched census numbers and Amazon hiring guesstimates—they’re notoriously close mouthed—and blogged, in an infamous post in May, that, thanks to Amazon’s gender distribution (which payscale.com reports as 76 percent male), Seattle had “passed the tipping point” of gender imbalance.
And
..(a Harvard study found that 56 percent of female computer professionals leave the field midcareer)
Those stats show nothing. And neither do the others.
I don't see the cite for that Harvard study. But how many men leave mid-career? And why? I left because because two companies in a row that I worked for replaced us with H1-Bs or off-shored our jobs. I saw the writing on the wall. And I got tired of spending 10--12 hours a day/6 days a week in front of a computer. (I tell you programming is MUCH more fun as a hobby!).
How about another profession: medical. In 1975,
females represented only 22.7 percent of
all applicants to medical school (Figure
1). By 2003, females reached 50.8 percent
of the applicant pool. Since then, the
percentage of all female applicants
to medical school has been decliningAnd? My interpretation is that most women are smart enough not to get into a deadend career like technology and go for the big bucks in medicine - that view is just as valid as this article's based on what little information is offered.
Instead of posting these stories, how about some studies? How about asking girls what their career aspirations are?
Anybody can "run numbers" and find patterns.
And statisticians here, why aren't you raising hell over the shitty interpretation of statistics?
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Re:What about nursing??
Because women who want go into medicine end up nurses instead of doctors. This is the result of stereotypes, peer pressure and a largely male establishment.
In 2011-2012, women represented 47.0% of entering students entering medical school, and it's been hovering at just below half (around 47-49%) for the past decade. This value has also been approximately proportional to the gender mix of applicants, which was 47.3% female in 2011-2012.
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Re:Fuck that guy.
I'm not even sure what "unfairly tough and racially biased requirements" means
Unfairly tough and racially biased requirements are whatever is required of or tested for among people that are employed by some segment of the workforce that exhibits an incorrect ratio of racial participation.
For example, since New York fire department minority applicants tended to fail the entrance exam at a higher rate than white applicants the entrance examine is, by definition, racially biased. When medical school requirements are found to impede racial quotas the solution is to create separate standards by race that specify "adjusted" MCAT and GPA figures to correct for systemic bias. The fact that the scores required of black/latino students are significantly lower than those of white/asian students DOES NOT INDICATE A LOWERING OF STANDARDS. Oh no. Rather, the lower score reflect the degree of inherent racial bias in the education system.
Got it?
The IT industry has escaped the good graces of contemporary racial justice for too long, as illustrated by your naivety. We welcome the good Reverend Jackson to the den of racial iniquity that is Silicon Valley and we look forward to the application of racial fairness we know he'll provide, and we're certain you do as well.
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Re:We are not equal...
In your fantasy land
...Listen, fuckwit. MEN AREN'T ENTERING THOSE PROFESSIONS.
Here in reality, things are dramatically different:
Here are the figures for Medicine and LawBoth are about 47/53 female/male
What was that you were saying again?
You bleating about male privilege is not backed up by the raw fucking numbers of men and women entering those professions.
Feeling foolish? I'll bet you do! Sorry about that. Reality is cruel sometimes...
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Re:I agree...Something like 20 new medical schools have opened in the US since 2005. Moreover, non-physician providers (including physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and naturopaths) are joining the system of both primary care providers and specialists. (I get to co-manage patients, now, with naturopathic oncologists, for example.)
I have not noted any downward pricing trend.
I have noted a lot of advertising from medical groups, however - in newspapers, sponsoring the weather on television, on billboards, and stadium walls. Not from new doctors coming to town, for the most part, since in most metropolitan areas small practices are increasingly being replaced by larger groups with more negotiating power or owned by hospital systems. That also doesn't seem to have improved pricing.
In most primary care practices I know of, you can typically make a same day appointment. I'd rue the day, however, you found an empty waiting room - that doesn't seem like the most efficient use of resources (especially given that physicians nearly all go through federally financed residencies in the US, and medical school itself elsewhere).
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Re:So what. Doctors SHOULD be paid more. -- Wrong
Every year, the med school cohort is about 20,000 per year (~80K in school at any given time https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/). The total bill for this (assuming your $250K/student/year) sums to $20 billion / year. In 2011, total healthcare spending was $2.7 trillion (http://go.cms.gov/13juHDi).
Actually, it's closer to $250,000 per student over four years.
http://gradschool.about.com/od/medicalschool/f/MedSchoolCost.htm
Question: How Much Does Medical School Cost?
Medical school can be expensive and therefore, it would be beneficial to consider the cost of med school before applying.
Answer: According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the median tuition in 2010-2011 was $28,685 at a public institution and $46,899 at a private institution. Note that tuition does not include books, lab fees, etc. In 2010-2011 the median total cost of attendance was $49,298 and $66,984 for public and private universities, respectively.
I would like to know if they calculated that per school or per student.
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40% med students don't graduate? - WRONG
Absolutely not - it's about 96% of medical students graduate
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Re:MD degree is to long and the school mindset may
As a molecular biologist I have to ask: how would that matter? The MDs that have patients don't really need to be thinking about ATPases or the Michaelis–Menten equation. The MDs that are taking basic research and putting it into the field seem to be getting their PhDs which can't be easily faked. And the just regular PhDs are in theory doing the really basic research that involves knowledge of mobio, we don't go to med school or see patients.
Having gotten my Ph.D in the basic research wing of a major medical school, I can concur that MD's typically have only a vague understanding of mechanistic biochemistry, and that the Ph.D's designing future treatments have only a vague understanding of human physiology. Exactly how is this a satisfactory state of affairs?
If you were ill with some condition that presented in an unusual way, (say, a borderline metabolic deficiency), would you prefer your M.D. to actually be able to figure out on their own what's wrong with you, or just blindly follow diagnostic recipes they memorized from the New England Journal of Medicine?
The only reason I can see for wanting a premed student to take molecular biology is to add another level of selection to deter the weakest students from becoming doctors.
You are aware that intro molecular biology is now taught in the second year of any standard biology major, or sometimes combined with biochemistry in your third year? My wife is an ecologist and she took it. Pre-vets take it. Nurses take it in nursing school. Heck, my dentist took advanced biochemistry as well. So why are you against pre-meds taking it? You think a doctor doesn't need to be as capable as a nurse, vet, or dentist? It's not exactly quantum physics, and it's extremely useful since you may only get the abbreviated "molecular medicine" type of crash course in med school since they assume you already took it as a premed.
Interestingly, I've heard that the major that scores the highest on average on the MCAT is actually not premed, biology, or chemistry. Philosophy majors do the best on the MCAT. Granted, there's a lot of self-selection going on there, they probably make up at most 1% of the MCAT takers, and the MCAT is not necessarily an indicator of who will be a good doctor.
You can see a list of the topics covered on the MCAT below which covers (surprise!) molecular/cell biology and biochemistry. Unless the philosophy majors are cheating, they must have at least self-studied the material to score so highly, but more likely than not they took a course or two. I'm really puzzled what you are trying to prove here.
https://www.aamc.org/students/download/85566/data/bstopics.pdf
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Re:The MCAT is crap
We are screening for automatons when we should be screening for thinkers.
Please tell me how you can efficiently screen for this. For current med school freshmen in the AAMC schools, there were 42742 applicants (31834 of whom were first-time applicants). There were 18665 matriculants. (Source) The MCAT allows schools to reject clearly unqualified applicants out of hand, while interviewing a group of people that actually stand a good chance of doing well.
Pre-med students are merely training for what life is like in med school, and they are demonstrating adaptive behaviors for those who wish to succeed in an environment that is effectively zero-sum: at the end of the day, my doing better means that someone else is worse off, and vice versa. There are only so many slots in the really competitive residencies, and so you either get one - or you do not.
TL;DR: don't hate the player, hate the game. -
Re:also: more doctors, less pay, more compassion.There are currently 133 licensed medical schools in the US:
That doesn't change your primary point about a limited supply of doctors producing a higher cost though, but I thought you might want updated numbers.
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Re:Health care: break the MD cartelMedical school enrollment IS increasing (with several new allopathic schools opening in the next few years - in Florida, Pennsylvania) and new osteopathic schools as well. This is unlikely to lower costs, as areas in the US with more doctors tend to have higher spending on physicians services - more doctors simply do more stuff. The same seems to be true of hospital beds - see the reports on supply sensitivity in the Dartmouth Health Atlas. So long as doctors get paid principally for doing stuff, and not for keeping people healthy, you can expect increased costs as a side effect.
The organization you are looking to blame is the AAMC by the way, which licenses medical schools, not the AMA, who spend their time making press releases and filling my mailbox with "Renewal invoices" despite the fact I haven't been a member for 10 years.
Sorry about your proposition, but it's really very manifestly wrong.
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Re:Good for you
A search for: +"american medical association" returns
6th place - http://www.aamc.org/
7th place - http://www.amsa.org/although neither one contains the phrase. I'm only searching one phrase, and the page doesn't have it?!
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Re:costs
You're totally wrong in thinking that lowering the bar for admission to medical school will have any impact on the number of doctors graduating from medical schools in the USA. In this document, released by the Association of American Medical Colleges (which runs the unified application program for all but a handful of American) you can see on page 3 that while the number of applicants to medical schools is about 45,000 per year as of 2007, only about 17,800 students actually got into medical school (less than 40% of applicants). This isn't because 20,000+ students mis-read the requirements or didn't pass organic chemistry. Every medical school in the country fills its incoming class, 100%, every single year, meaning enough qualified candidates exist to populate our medical education system (with 20,000+ left over!) We have plenty of people interested in becoming doctors, but there simply isn't the CAPACITY for all students who want to become doctors to do so. Since 1982, the number of open positions at American medical schools has increased from 16,567 to 17,759. That is an increase in number of accepted students per year of just 7% - over the course of 25 years!
There simply are not enough spots for willing applicants. We need more medical schools in the US (when was the last time you heard of a new medical school opening anywhere?) Almost all of the 45,000 applicants each year will have completed all of their pre-med requirements, including organic chemistry. Organic chemistry is not the barrier to having more doctors in our country. The statistics prove that the real barrier is a lack of funding for new medical schools and a lack of expansion of existing medical education programs. -
Re:Flexible Posner QuoteI think first of all that Childhood is growing, like the red gelatin in that movie "The Blob." In fact, currently, I think there's an assumption that Childhood ends not at 18, but at 21. After 4 years of college, and at "drinking age."
I've heard a disturbing meme being propagated by Nanny Statists as well. They say, "the brain continues to develop until the age of 25," implying that childhood ought to be extended until then.
What's the purpose of this? Well, partly because since the state has decided it has a particular interest in raising children, it gives the state more power. Also, it warehouses people for longer, keeping them useless and out of the workforce and decreasing the number of people competing for jobs.
I was particularly sickened when the media started looking at whether Seung Hui Cho's rampage was brought on by violent video games. I shouldn't be surprised though, considering the distorted story of James Dallas Eggbert was used to hammer Dungeons and Dragons.
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Re:More Doctor Supply = Lower Prices
Today, many MD's make less in absolute terms than in previous generations. Primary care, internal medicine, family practice, pediatrics...all are making significantly less money than in the past. I make more as a software consultant and I do not have to go to college, medical school or put up with the internships and fellowships. The result?
http://www.aamc.org/newsroom/pressrel/2003/031104. htm
"After a six-year decline, the number of applicants to U.S. medical schools is on the rise, according to data released today by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Almost 35,000 individuals applied to attend medical school in the 2003-2004 school year, a 3.4 percent increase over last year's applicant pool of 33,625. The main reason for the increase was the number of women applicants - 17,672 - an almost seven percent rise over last year's total."
Note the first phrase...a six-year decline. -
Re:Bad idea
I think dumbing the program down to attract women is ultimately a bad idea.
Isn't it possible changes could be made that did not constitute 'dumbing down'?
For example, 2003 was the first year that female medical school applicants outnumbered male. This doesn't implicitly mean medical courses have been dumbed down for women; it could mean opinions in society have been changed, and/or courses have been modified to appeal to both genders instead of just one.
Perhaps similar modifications could be made to computer science courses. For example, if computer science courses over-emphasise a 'hacker culture' of all-night programming sessions and cold pizza eating, that might not appeal to women. But you could discard such culture without harming the academic integrity of the course. -
Re:Did anyone try the Mask feature?
It actually worked on this site: https://services.aamc.org/AMCAS2_2007/
When selecting "Mask as Internet Explorer" in site-specific-preferences. -
med school apps suck
https://services.aamc.org/AMCAS2_2007/
says
Unsupported Browser
AMCAS supports only the following web browsers for Windows:
* Internet Explorer 5.5
* Internet Explorer 6 Get it here
* Netscape 7 Get it here
* Firefox 1.0.2
* Firefox 1.5 Get it here
If you try to use anything else, even firefox 2.0, it won't let you in :'( -
Re:Yet...
Until a president has the balls to say that doctors, hospitals and parms are EXTORTING the American public and make laws to stop them it will not change.
Disclaimer: My wife is a doctor
Okay, let's just take a quick look at some numbers:
From the UAW a UAW represented assembler makes $25.63/hour straight time. This translates to over $53k/year assuming no OT. To my knowledge (quite possible wrong) to obtain this job, you need only a high school diploma. They report post inflation annual raises (from '92-'02) of 1.28%. Average college costs ~$20k (average of public and private, exclude out of state) and is rising by 7% each year. In 1999 med school cost ~$18k (again taking a conservative average), I couldn't find numbers for the annual increase, but given the costs we incurred, 7% is a reasonable number again. Books add even more, to the tune of ~$4k across the first two years. Let's look at a doctor's income stream vs. a UAW assembler assuming they are the high school class of 2003:
First year out of high school, -20k vs. $53k
second, -21.4k vs. $53.7k
third, -22.9k vs. $54.4k
forth, -24.5k vs. $55.1k
Onto medical school we go!
1st year, -25.6k (no inflation for books) vs. 55.8k
2nd year, -27.2k vs. 56.5k
3rd year, -27k (assume no more books) vs. 57.2k
4th year, -28.9k vs. 58.7k
Time for residency, pay based on my wife's:
1st year, 31k vs. 59.5k
2nd year, 31.5k vs. 60.2k
3rd year, 32k vs. 61k
OK, now our doctor is ready to go out and start making real money....where do they stand finacially?
-$83k vs. $567.9k
Most of my wife's medical school friends enter residency with school loan payments to the tune of $1,200/month, basically a second mortgage. So now our doctor gets to go to work. Care to guess how much this doctor is going to get paid for seeing a child on medicaid? $7. Yes, that is right, they will get the princely sum of $7 to see that child for a 15 minute visit. That will probably not cover the cost of the people they must hire to file the paperwork to get paid. That works out to $28/hour while our assembler is now earning $29.48/hour (this is an inflation adjusted number, that means the real number will be much higher since 1% inflation is pretty darn low!). Who was it that was extorting whom? Does that auto worker go to work every day knowing that they could get sued and have everything except their house taken from them (my wife was threatened with lawsuits 3 times as a medical student for Pete's sake! Care to guess how much her malpractice insurance premiums are estimated to be? Over $20k/year.)? Yes, doctors can get paid well, but I would say in many respects they have earned it a lot more than others.
I'm sorry for this rant, but people who just spout off like doctors in general are super greedy really irk me (for obvious reasons). The people you need to be more concerned with are the insurance companies (basically profit generating machines from my perspective) and the lawyers (who make my wife live in constant fear that we will have everything taken away from us someday...oh wait, we get to keep the house and its mortgage).