I work at a small newspaper in one of the caribbean islands and this is one of the stories we are carrying in our regional section tomorrow. We have one of these schools on our island. These are the doctors and nurses that will be treating you Americans in the future! No wonder doctors screw up all the time!
My understanding is that the students do the first couple of years of med school at one of these places and then transfer to a US school for the last two years, taking the place of drop outs. I knew two people who planned to go this route but I didn’t keep in touch with them to find out if the succeeded.
One of my oldest friends is a MD and I asked him about those guys. He said that they virtually never get into good residency programs and objects of some ridicule. It’s almost a certainty that you won’t find one of these guys performing brain surgery.
Haj
Well, call me a nut, but I’m not going to judge someone’s abilities as a doctor just because they went to an offshore school. Medical school is extremely competitive. It’s possible that some of those “rejects” had high undergrad GPAs and impressive tests scores…but just not high or impressive enough.
As for academic rigor, I don’t think we have enough info based on that article to judge whether the new school will be bad or good. What the “critics say” isn’t enough for me to form an opinion.
Besides, graduates still have to take U.S. board exams and do a residency in the U.S. to practice medicine here, no? If the education were that inferior, they wouldn’t be able to pass the exams or get into a residency program.
Absolutely. And the boards are very difficult. My cousin has an MD from a Mexican university and he had to pass the boards to practice in the US.
My former assistant (in a research lab) started med school at one of the med schools in the Caribbean this past fall. She was one of the most competent and intelligent people I have worked with professionally, so if she is typical of the students there, i wouldn’t be worried.
Madera Universidad de Medicina!
[/obscure movie reference]
So why couldn’t she get into Med school in the States?
Bad Medicine, right?
I look at it like this: The more doctors in favor of medical marijuana, the better! 
There are many smart and competent people who get rejected from competitive schools. I don’t think a person with a 3.7 GPA is necessarily dumber than a person with a 3.9 GPA. Nor do I think there’s a big difference between two people who’s MCAT scores differ by a couple of points. And yet–when admissions boards are looking at extremely competitive candidates, small differences like that can make all the world a difference in acceptance. As well as things like extracurriculars, volunteer work, interview performance, letters of recommendation, etc. Even ethnicity and socioeconomic status. It’s a complicated mix, and it’s very easy not to have all the “qualifications”. Especially since it seems the qualifications keep getting harder and harder to achieve.
I also don’t think you should assume that just because a person goes to an offshore school means that they were thoroughly rejected from all stateside schools. I know someone who chose to apply to only a few vet schools in the States (her top choices) plus an offshore school as a back-up. She got rejected from her top choices and is now in a tropical country somewhere. But who knows? Maybe she would have gotten accepted to Cornell if she had dared.
If I really wanted to be a doctor, and I sincerely believed that I have what it takes to be one–damn the rejected letters from Columbia and Harvard–I would enroll myself in an offschool program and then prove my salt afterwards, just like everyone else. Just like if I couldn’t go to Harvard or Princeton for college, I wouldn’t turn my back on the quality state schools who would have me in a heartbeat, but maybe don’t have the same level of name recognition. You do what you have to do, fuck the namebrand-lovin’ critics.
I got my MD from Johns Hopkins. I’ve worked with a number of caribbean grads.
I would send my family members to some of those caribbean grads before I’d send them to some Johns Hopkins grads I know.
FWIW.
Hey, it’s still better than California Upstairs Medical School!
My cousin went to an off-shore medical school and is doing his residency in surgery now. He had a really high GPA but I have a feeling his MCATs weren’t so hot.
My sister had a 3.9 GPA and a 36 on her MCATs and only got into 3 out of the 12 schools she applied to. She got interviews and secondaries at all of them but wasn’t admitted to very many. Got waitlisted at all but 1, and two of those admits were off the waiting list in the middle of the summer. (although admittedly she got into her very competitive reach school and didn’t get into any of her safety or middling schools).
All I’m saying is-there may be many reasons people do or don’t get into medical school in the US. It’s really, really competitive and it’s difficult to judge whether or not those Caribbean grads are destined to be “bad doctors.”
Yup. A movie that was actually much better than it had any right to be.