Turf War Brews Between Medical Schools
2011
Caribbean medical schools have long been decried as diploma mills for the rich and undeserving; they are strictly for-profit institutions serving American kids rejected by U.S. medical schools, yet they rely on hospitals in the U.S. to provide the necessary clinical experience in the third and fourth years of a medical education. Recently, however, an effort has begun in New York City to limit their access to local hospitals since there are only a certain number of spots available for such field work, and charges of elitism are flying. Yet how did foreign and domestic medical schools come to be competing for the same spots in domestic hospitals?
Because Caribbean medical schools are first and foremost businesses, they charge a lot of money to provide something of a second chance for students rejected by American medical schools. At an elite institution like Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, donors from investment banker Sanford I. Weill to real estate developer Isaac Toussie with all their money, resulting in tuition and fees of about forty-five thousand dollars a year. Compare that to the Caribbean ones, where it can cost up to sixty thousand dollars!
Now, due to such high fees, Caribbean medical schools can easily pay New York City hospitals to take on their students for the practical clinical experience required of an accredited medical education – ahead of Weill Cornell’s, or NYU’s, or that from any other New York medical school.
Thus the turf war.
Traditionally, hospitals agree to mentor, in effect, a medical school’s students because they like to be associated with prestigious names. Caribbean medicals schools have no brand name to offer, but they do have several tens of millions of dollars to pump into a hospital’s coffers, in effect paying for their students to be placed.
And what administrator is going to do without such money, especially in this economy?