There are a ton of shitty doctors and entire geographic regions that are deprived of specialists because of this kind of nonsense. Your policy may help a few people but it harms all of society.
Sort of. In many areas it's possible to do a good-enough job of sorting out the people who will almost certainly succeed. It won't be perfect, but nothing is. If there are enough of those to fill a long and specialized training program to the point where actual needs are met, then you shouldn't be letting a bunch of extra "maybes" in too, because that just introduces bad outcomes at the end that could be avoided.
On the other hand, because of supply, finding a good lawyer just requires a bit of money, well within reach of the average person facing a criminal trial or some civil dispute. Finding a good doctor requires sitting on waitlists for months (if you’re lucky enough to find one taking new patients) unless you have enough money to afford a concierge service, which the vast majority of people cannot afford. I’ve had bad concierge doctors but I’ve never had a shitty lawyer paying that kind of money.
I mean really, where do we stop? There’s many more English literature graduates than jobs. Same with ____ studies and just about every other humanities degree. Do we restrict those too? How about higher education altogether?
There’s an important debate to be had about government financing and the non-dischargeability of loans and all its effects, but restricting education based on job supply is just harmful to societies on so many levels.
This is a two way street. Everybody needs medical care. Almost everyone is going to need legal advice in their lives. Depriving them of competent care and representation does far more harm than limiting supply would save. Failed medical students don’t die from the ordeal, but patients do.
The washout rate for A&P aircraft mechanics is on the order of 75%. Imagine if healthcare were as reliable as airplanes (though there’s a shortage there too).
You're getting the basic facts wrong. As least in the US, the restriction is acceptance to medical school. Part of the reasoning is they don't want to accept anyone who they think will fail years down the line, because that's bad for everyone (you, me, the failed student, and the teachers who aren't in it for the $$$). There's a surplus of residency slots (overall), because otherwise no foreign-trained doctors would ever be able to practice here.
Lots of foreign-trained doctors practice here.
My position is they need to increase medical school admissions (and residency slots), but not throw the doors wide open to all comers. The slots need to be managed such that anyone who gets can complete the program and will have a job waiting for them that pays commensurate with the amount of training they receive, but probably much less than many doctors get now.
> I mean really, where do we stop? There’s many more English literature graduates than jobs. Same with ____ studies and just about every other humanities degree.
Yes. What's happening with English literature graduates (at least on the PhD level) is an exploitative travesty.
> ...but restricting education based on job supply is just harmful to societies on so many levels.
I disagree. It's harmful to string people along with false hope, only to slam the door in their face at the end. It's harmful for society for people to waste time on a job training program (which is what medical education really is) for a job they'll never get.
There needs to be a distinction made between general education and job training. Unless you're independently wealthy, specialized formal education needs to perform both functions.
> The washout rate for A&P aircraft mechanics is on the order of 75%.
Aircraft mechanic school is about 18-24 months (https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/how-long-...), and costs a few tens of thousands of dollars. That's not comparable, at all.
> Imagine if healthcare were as reliable as airplanes (though there’s a shortage there too).
Sure imagine that, but people aren't manufactured products. Not a valid comparison.
Not really relevant. We're not talking about the general concept of "success", we're talking about if the market for some profession or academic pursuit can support a certain number of people entering it. That's something that you can predict reasonably well. Not perfectly, and there can certainly be outlier events that drastically change things unexpectedly. But it's possible to have reasonably accurate forecasting here.
As for "success", sure, it's hard to tell if any individual who wants to enter a particular field will do it well enough to be successful. Admissions departments at universities can sometimes do an ok job predicting that, but they often end up being wrong (in both directions). That's just life.
The medical profession is of course doing those forecasts and then artificially restricting things further, in order to maintain high salaries and high prestige. I don't think we'd be having this argument if they weren't so greedy and set limits at reasonable levels such that we had enough doctors and specialists out there to handle patients promptly and effectively.
It could vary year by year, so a year with a really great cohort, maybe the majority would come through, whereas with a bad cohort almost all of them wouldn't make it.