Jeremy VanGelder wrote:I know that in other countries people who want to be MDs can go to medical school straight out of high school. In the US you have to earn a Bachelor's degree first. And the Bachelor's doesn't have to even be biology or medical in many cases. So that is a full 4 years of extra schooling that Doctors here have to pay for.
living in one of these countries, let me be the devil's advocate- you may find yourself before a judge who's all of 22 years old (law school, like med, is also a bachelor's), or your oncologist may be 23. Having that extra 4 years of "growing time" has merits. Personally I go for a doctor with gray hair, and I like judges with some life experience. I agree with you on the financial burden though.
Where I live (Brazil) we have federal universities, as well as low-cost state universities (which are very much like US state schools). If you can get into the federal, it's free. You need to take competitive exams to get in and it's hard- the entire state is competing for those slots. The government and private industry both invest in the federal schools, though, and the best research comes out of them. In the meantime, there is also a strong network of private and very pricey universities (generally catholic) where the fancy people send their kids, since the federal one also has slots reserved for certain disadvantaged groups and some people don't like the idea of mixing. But you want your doctor to have graduated medicine from the federal university, not one of these fancy private schools, if possible.
And for those who can't get into the federals/states and can't pay for the catholic universities, there are lower-level private universities. I don't think this is that different from the US. They can cost big money or be more affordable. But post-covid, many are still online and quality varies dramatically. People take on debt to study and to send their kids.
Here, though, college can really change your life in terms of job access, particularly in the less privileged classes. People still see it as the way to make life better for their kids.
I don't think that's too different from the US though- I'm the first in my family (in the US) to go to college, my family all worked blue collar jobs (factories, slaughterhouses, my father drove a truck). but again, like the US, a college degree is only going to move you a step or two up the social ladder. You might become an engineer or surgeon with a lot of hard work, but there are still rigid social hierarchies that mostly still apply no matter what you do. And then there's the question of debt. My brother got his PhD and is still paying it off at 45 (and most of it was at a state university AND he had some sort of military scholarship from my father). I was lucky to get off with only a little (20k) and could pay it off within the first two years of my first real job.
Google tells me my university now costs 71k per year (it was 20, when I was there).
I was going to get a master's but needed scholarship funding, and when that got cut in the late 90s I left the US to work abroad (the economy was rather crummy back then too). While today my university offers free tuition and room/board to anyone whose family makes less than 100k, and free tuition for anyone less than 200k, the amount of money involved is insane and the kids today are way smarter than I was (I used to volunteer interviewing incoming kids, they're monsters!). I didn't feel our chances of being able to finance this whole mess for my own kid were that great back when we lived in the US, and so we decided to seek other alternatives.
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