Realistically, it takes 4 years to attempt to get your foot in the door at a medical school unless you have pre-admittance or you're looking at a special case like UMKC's 6-year program. Getting into an MD or a DO program isn't a guaranteed thing. It's a substantial downside risk.

Also, you can have a STEM-based undergraduate education as your pre-med, even math and computer science can count if you take the right additional electives. The two aren't mutually exclusive. It's a good fallback if you bomb out of getting into med school (or decide 3 years into ugrad that you don't want to apply).

True, though many of the initiatives for more STEM workers (through visa programs) focus more on graduate students, especially at the PhD level. There are various exemptions to visa caps for people with grad degrees, and there was a proposal (that died along with general immigration reform) to provide a green card to anyone with a PhD in certain STEM fields, with a possibility for people with MS degrees should there not be enough PhDs.

It's not 100%, but I'd say there is definitely a push toward graduate education in the "STEM worker shortage" conversation.

Interestingly, a RAND study found that the reason people with choice don't get PhDs in STEM fields is because they aren't competitive with the "professions", or even para-professions in health related areas.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/issue_papers/2005...