Holy Shit! Imagine being the CEO of a RadioShack, then saying "I want to become a Doctor" and actually doing it. That's amazing! Love this story.
If you've read anything about what they were like as a band that's quite a career path!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Baxter#Defense_consulting...
Agreed. Now imagine being a similarly aged retail service worker, or agricultural laborer, and doing the same. Even more amazing, if rare. The point is: both the drive and capital are needed. This person clearly had both at their disposal.
"The AAMC explains that the percentage of medical students from families in the highest quintile of household income has not dropped below 48 percent since 1987—half of students come from the richest 20 percent of the population—while the percentage of students from the lowest quintile has never risen above 5.5 percent [9]"
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/sites/journalofethics.a...
This is anecdotal, but my elementary school class was full of doctors kids and I can tell you that the doctor parents would almost disown their kid if they didn't get into medical school. Doctors seem to have a very strong opinion on the medical field being the only right option.
So in that sense it's more of a correlation with money, and a causation through inheritance.
In my case.... my dad is a doctor and it was sort of expected I become one myself. Its not my thing though, or it wasn't at the time so now (like a lot of people on this forum) I work in engineering. In a way I do regret it now, because I wish I did something "useful" to society.
My younger sister however, did go to med school and is about to finish. She was very driven from a young age - I don't remember her saying she wants to become anything else but a doc. When her and my dad talk, I feel a little left out and only occasionally I have the feeling they look at me and shake their heads.
That's a claim a lot of people make (I think I'd probably agree with it), and the parent comment is disagreeing.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than having to spend mid-five figures. That the student learns law, medicine, math, physics, biology or any other university discipline doesn't cost more or less to the family.
The benefit for the country however is massive. The "cost" of training a doctor is repaid infinitely by the benefits of medicine itself (and great tax contributions!) during their whole career (30+ years).
I wish it were like that everywhere...
It costs a lot more than that to become a doctor in the US. Typical student loan debt for doctors is well into 6 digits.
https://www.bestmedicaldegrees.com/is-medical-school-worth-i...
[1] https://www.medicineandthemilitary.com/joining-and-eligibili...
A family in the top 5% of incomes with one child and zero financial issues and can pull it off. But, that’s well past just middle class.
I'm confused because need based financial aid for medical schools is still mostly loans. My partner who comes from a relatively poor family (they used to be on welfare) had most of their need based financial aid in the form of loans. Out of her residency class the highest % of folks taking out loans were from low to middle income families not well off families. So I'm curious where you got that stat from?
To go from ab initio to an airline pilot role, the cost is in the area of $200,000 - $250,000 now and there's a lot of ways to end up not getting picked for an airline job.
Entry salary is up from $18,000 to $40,000 or so now, but that's not much improvment considering the cost of training.
Part of the issue is the 1,500 hour experience rule, which is government-imposed. (There's an option for 1,200 hours, but then your major has to be airline-focused., preventing them from wisely diversifying their career options.)
US airlines are in a bind because their policy is to not subsidize initial training, but cannot fly without pilots.
And students are getting sticker-shock, and thinking about other careers with better ROI and certainty.
There's an underlying premise, I think, that countries like France or Germany seek to minimize the cost of healthcare in general, because the bill is collectively paid— the bottom line is a direct cost on GDP, that's what mutualizing bills means i.e. "social security", beyond that the whole socialistic apparel of redistribution of (some % of) wealth.
Artificially inflating any of these mutual bills simply means that some (people, corporations, the medical field entirely including drugs and supplies) would take more than they should from all others, financially. Starting with having to buy their way in the field (exactly the kind of artificial gating that modern democracies sought to remove, historically; long-term it's no better than saying "voting costs $100k per person").
It's a form of inner competition at a national level, because the enrichment of some hampers the velocity of the whole towards the core mission. It's a huge distraction, at best.
In layman terms: because I'm gonna charge 200 instead of 100, the country can only buy N/2 worth of what I do. If "I" is the entire field of medicine drugs/supplies/infra, we only cure half what we could, but I personally get 2x profits. It's wrong on every level when we're talking about mutual bills.
But in the USA, the bills are not (yet) mutualized, not enough of them... so there is no incentive to keep costs low and treat as much as we could, because microeconomically, it makes more sense for the field of medicine to increase its relative profit. Unless you add the macroeconomic coupling, that bills are mutualized and everybody pays them at the end of the day, it just can't / won't change imho.
However, when I talked to admissions staff, this counted for essentially nothing. My prerequisites were out of date—-I’d have to go take biology and physics (with lab!), even though I’d spent the last 6 years measuring the electrical activity of living brains in living animals. I’d need to volunteer in a hospital for....whatever reason. None of this would have been insurmountable but it would have added another year or two to the process, while making less than a grad student and pushing a real job even further into the future.
This is especially maddening since the NIH is particularly keen on training physician-scientists, but everything seems designed for physician->scientist and not the other way around even though we have a glut of biomedical researchers and not enough doctors!
Correct. I assume it's not specific to France, and that it's the case in many developed countries. I suspect the US are the exception.
I'd add it's uncommon for French students in demanding fields to work part time. However, it is quite easy to get a scholarship if your parents earn below a certain income.
Having money can help though, for instance to pay some external tutors which may be useful to pass the entrance examination.