Med School for Dummies

Along with (because of?) the familiar phenomenon of grade inflation has come the related phenomenon of qualification inflation. To wit, jobs that once required nothing more than a high-school diploma now often call for college degrees, and jobs that called for bachelor's degrees now more and more often require applicants to have graduate degrees. Our two master's degrees barely enabled us to land a spot here at blogger.com!

In general, we disapprove of this trend. Frankly, most jobs--even white-collar office jobs--do not require the advanced academic training theoretically conferred by a college diploma. At the same time, the fact that nearly all jobs worth holding require some postsecondary education diminishes the whole college experience: No longer is college a place to explore interests and broaden one's mind; instead, it is a factory of pure pragmatism, where any field of study that does not lead obviously to a specific career path invites patronizing smiles and questions of, "But what are you going to do with a degree in that?"

One field, however, for which we think colleges do and should provide a clear path of practical instruction is medicine. Call us snobbish, but when we go to a doctor, we want to know--or at least be able to maintain the illusion--that the man or woman we are talking to was the cream of the academic crop. Thus, we felt uneasy when reading "Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences." It seems the prestigious Mt. Sinai medical school offers a program called "Humanities and Medicine," wherein select students can enroll in medical school without having taken the MCATs or organic chemistry or physics in college.

Now, in fairness, the program's graduates seem to perform as well as those doctors who undergo more conventional training. Not surprisingly, many of these students focus on specialties like psychiatry or primary care, as opposed to those fields more commonly associated with "alpha-med-school students" like surgery. And we can agree that it's not that important that a psychiatrist or pediatrician have a strong background in physics.

What bothers us is not so much that some doctors may not have studied physics or o-chem--or taken a standardized (if challenging) test like the MCAT; we certainly don't plan to quiz our primary care physician about light refraction. At the same time, though, we derive comfort in knowing (or, as mentioned above, believing) that our doctor has the intellectual wherewithal to answer such questions should they arise.