Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades?
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
So train more doctors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association#R...
Wow. 1997: https://www.baltimoresun.com/1997/03/01/ama-seeks-limit-on-r...
> “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. “The current rate of physician supply — the number of physicians entering the work force each year — is clearly excessive.”
> The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who become residents each year.
> The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate.
But maybe that's a free market fantasy. Who knows.
Or the alternative. Government-owned everything healthcare - facilities, hospitals, med schools, doctor practices. Doctors only work for the government.
The current system is neither here nor there and is designed for maximum profit.
MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam annually." So it should work fairly well for them to sort by MCAT and take however many they have (or expect to have) room for.
See also: "Cultural fit" when hiring.
The actual solution is to increase the number of slots for training doctors to match the huge number of qualified applicants. It makes even more sense given that there is a shortage of doctors and health care costs are astronomical.
I live in Ontario and we're there. 40% of Waterloo students had above a 95% average in high school. The average GPA to get into UofT med school is 3.94/4.00 GPA.
What has happened as a result is students killing themselves and each other. If you fail one test in any course, you cannot move to the next level.
So, if you go on the UofT subreddit there's endless stories of pre-med students sabotaging each other. Faking friendliness, destroying notes, etc etc. This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/1sbu811/had_no_idea_t...
You don't want this type of person as a doctor. They will sabotage others because that is how they got ahead in the past. In a medical environment that kills people.
Training more doctors is just never an option for some reason.
Don't build systems that reward amoral psychopaths.
So there is a low ceiling, and if they instead used MCAT or something with a higher ceiling (where, apparently, the number of perfect scores is about 50 per year—in America, presumably lower in Canada due to population size), then studying harder would benefit them. That seems like a much better outlet for competitive urges.
But also, how small is the pool of qualified applicants? If there were something like "they're going to take n people from your school, at which there are 30 plausible candidates", then sabotaging one might conceivably be worthwhile. But if the pool is—well, Google says 3,000 medical students get accepted each year in Canada (and the qualified applicant pool is presumably at least somewhat larger), and sabotaging one person is extremely unlikely to help you personally. (This is one case where it's good that the expected-value "benefits", of sabotaging person X, are widely distributed among thousands of medical candidates, and thus it's a "free-rider problem" where no individual candidate has a strong motivation to do the work.)
Is there some multi-stage thing where they pick 10 people from each high school, or 30 from a town, or something? Or is there major grading on a curve, or a big benefit for being the top person in your classroom of 15? That seems like how you would get real incentives for this backstabbing behavior. Otherwise, I can't see how it's rational (even to a complete sociopath), and would have to chalk it up to individual miscreants and possibly some kind of culture that encourages it in other ways.
Yes. UofT even has "down curves" where your mark is lowered to ensure the correct distribution.
Sounds like we need more spots for these people to go
Military academies are more of a upper class thing though.
That's a pretty wide net. What percentage of the total population has a military connection in that many degrees?
So the richest, most prestigious schools where legacy admissions are a gateway to the upper classes, will keep the policy.
Affirmative action was gutted by SCOTUS when Biden was president. Not that it was popular before. California of all places rejected it by 56-44 margin in 2020.
e.g. my buddy whose grandad was a lineman and later a telephone company manager, and dad was a mechanical engineer, and he ended up SRE / devops