It's the fault of the universities, IMO. The admissions criteria is supposed to be designed to select bright and well rounded, altruistic students. In actuality, it favors students who tend to be self-serving, narrow minded and good test takers.
It begins with the med schools' obsession with grades. Grades are everything. Premed students limit their courses to the prerequisites, and only choose electives that give easy A's. Why choose a challenging elective that could teach you something useful if it might drag down your gpa when basket weaving is a sure thing? It's in the student's best interest to have an artificially high gpa rather than a
better education. The average engineering student with a 3.5 gpa is helluva lot smarter than the average premed with a 4.0. Nobody would argue that. But it doesn't matter. It's a numbers game.
The schools want students with clinical experience. How does someone unqualified get experience doing a job that requires qualifications? Unless they were a nurse or something similar, they don't - at least not anything meaningful. And never mind the fact that giving students clinical experience is supposed to be the school's job. Regardless, in order to gain this all important clinical experience, premeds spend a few hours a week volunteering at the old folks home, dumping bedpans or wheeling demented 90-year-old ladies up and down the hallways. The students only do it because they have to - they know it's bullshit - and granny doesn't know the difference. But as soon as the admissions committee sees that nursing home experience on the application, they check that box and say, '"Oh, boy! This one knows their way around a hospital" Big deal! So does the janitor.
The schools want high scores on the MCATs, so students pay somebody to prep them by narrowing the focus to only the bare minimum needed to ensure they get a score over 30. Doesn't matter if they actually understand the material, as long as they can score high enough on the test to make admissions happy, that's all that matters. Check that box off too.
Then there's the interview. This is the biggest farce. This is where you have a bunch of doctors pretending to be expert interrogators as they try to weed out the assholes and narcissists from the altruists. But given the high number of assholes and narcissists working in the medical field, it's obvious they haven't been too successful. But I digress. The students already know the questions because there are prep courses, and books and websites for the interview, too. As long as the student is prepared, they just have to be charming, feed them some song and dance about their many and varied extracurricular activities, and show some awareness about current events in the field. Do that and they've got it made. Check that box off.
There's more but you get the idea. The result of all this is that most of the students who get accepted lack creativity and the ability to innovate. They're boring, narcissistic and the complete opposite of well-rounded. They're usually bright, but not
that bright. They tend to be followers who do what they're told because that's what the system rewards. They "choose not to diversify and learn anything outside of their specialty" because that's the type of person they are, and always have been - and more importantly, they were rewarded for it. They got into med school, didn't they? What incentive is there for them to do more? None that I can see. Who knows, maybe this is enough to successfully practice cookbook medicine. But the next Jonas Salk and Frederic Banting they will never be.
End of rant.
