As a biology major with an interest in health, a few medical internships under my belt and way too many friends who want to be doctors, I like to identify as a “fake pre-med.”
With almost four years of experience as a “fake pre-med,” I’ve seen firsthand how the path to medical school is structurally skewed to exclude low income students.
Preparing for and applying to medical school is too expensive. Even though a small slice of the student population at San Diego State University are interested in medical school, everyone is affected by how medical school admissions influence the quality of our healthcare.
When opportunity is not being equally distributed to the next generation’s doctors, patients will suffer.
Structural issues in the United States healthcare system overlook and underserve so many groups in our nation, and the uninsured, unhoused people and those who cannot afford preventive medicine are especially vulnerable. How can medical doctors expect to take part in community health initiatives, healthcare legislation and medical research if they don’t properly represent the people they will serve? How can a patient trust a doctor who has no idea what it’s like to be under financial stress?
Reducing the influence of socioeconomic status and nepotism is a key part of making medicine more diverse and inclusive.
According to a medical school admissions counselor, an applicant to 15 schools could expect to spend around $10,000 on the application process.
These costs include preparing for and taking the MCAT. The registration fee for the MCAT is usually over $300, and with a fee waiver that price could be reduced to $130. However, students who want to avoid taking the MCAT more times than necessary may opt to pay for test prep materials, which could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Medical school applicants can expect to spend about $3,000 on sending out applications alone. At each step of the process (initial, primary and secondary applications), a prospective student can expect to pay a fee for each school they are applying to.
For the lucky ones who earn interviews, they can expect to pay even more to cover the costs of travel and lodging to attend the interviews in-person. One medical student at Penn State spent over $2,700 on travel to interviews.
Let’s take a few steps back to before the application process even starts.
What makes a med school applicant competitive? On top of a stellar GPA, extracurricular hours spent on research and volunteering, and clinical experiences are taken into consideration as well. For students who are paying for their education and cost of living, it can be difficult to dedicate time to volunteer or to take on an unpaid research position. Moreover, for those who want hands-on experience with patients, it can even cost money (hundreds or even thousands of dollars) to get certified to work in a clinical environment as a nursing assistant, medical assistant or phlebotomist.
Students from more educated backgrounds are also more likely to know doctors already in the profession who can help them prepare for medical school through offering opportunities to shadow or participate in medical-related internships, jobs or shadowing. Not to mention, increased access to doctors and medical students for those in higher socioeconomic classes makes it easier to receive feedback on other elements of your application such as your statement of purpose.
In order to create more opportunities for lower income students in medicine, it is essential to offer more funded opportunities for experiential learning including internships, clinical experience, research and shadowing.
While for-credit learning opportunities are another possible alternative, major departments at SDSU should make an effort to widen the kinds of experiences that count towards upper division elective credits, or include more profession-related courses such as medical Spanish, EMT coursework or basic life safety so that students can prepare for their career directly while completing their degree.
An expensive path to medical will result in filtering out talented students who experience greater financial burden, and for the low income students who make it, the heightened cost of the pre-med journey will result in increased stress and likelihood of burnout that will in turn lower their ability to work effectively.
Not only is it important to tap into the underrepresented talent in low income populations, but it is also extremely important that all patients can receive quality, empathetic healthcare from a trusted doctor who can properly relate to their experiences.
No patient deserves to be intimidated by their doctor. No patient deserves to be treated like they are less than by a doctor who has never been challenged to think outside of their own privileged perspective.
Making the medical profession more accessible for future doctors will improve the quality of healthcare for all people in the United States.
Jessica Octavio is a senior studying microbiology. You can follow her on Twitter @jessicaoctavio_.
