The competition to gain medical school acceptance in South Africa is so fierce that even top-performing matriculants won’t necessarily get in and are being forced to look offshore, according to Jeremy Maggs on his daily Moneyweb programme.
Fortunately, overseas degrees, particularly from Europe, are regarded as highly credible – and the good news is many South Africans who train there actually return here afterwards.
Maggs said acceptance rates at leading local medical faculties are reported to be as low as 5%, with universities in Cyprus and Germany offering English-medium medical degrees as a more realistic route for strong South African applicants.
However, this raises difficult questions about access, about planning, about privilege, brain drain and whether, perhaps most importantly, the country is failing its future doctors before they even begin, he suggested.
In conversation with Brad Latilla-Campbell, country manager at admissions consultancy Crimson Education, Maggs asked if he believed South Africa was turning away future doctors that it so desperately needs.
While Latilla-Campbell would not commit to a yay or nay, he agreed that with the number of positions available, the country’s medical programmes were one of the only programmes in South African universities that could be considered competitive.
“In lots of other programmes, if you get enough points, your APS (Admission Point Score) and enough points to get in, you’ll get into that degree.
“But medicine is different. If you get enough points, you won’t necessarily get in. They can only take, as you say, the top 5% or 6%.”
This, he said, meant that “it’s self-selecting for extremely academically strong students, people who are high achievers”.
“But it also means there’s simply not enough space for people who are not getting 85%, 90% averages and seven or eight As across the board.”
And no room for a lot of students who are passionate about medicine, about becoming doctors and medical professionals.
“That’s where we’re seeing this bottleneck – you’re losing out simply because of your high school marks, which isn’t necessarily the best way to decide who is best for this job in the future,” he added.
Maggs observed that studying medicine overseas used to be seen as a fallback, and asked if this situation had changed.
Latilla-Campbell pointed that that there were still “incredible medical degrees available in this country”.
“I think that across the board, even the newer ones, with universities popping up with new medical degrees and programmes every year, they still have an extremely prestigious reputation.
“Loads of students and people across the country want to get into them because they produce such fantastic medical professionals, doctors, nurses and so on.
“But we now have enough students who are capable of doing a medical degree who can look overseas at getting those degrees at universities there, in Europe in particular – and who can then come back and practise here.”
The down side, said Maggs, was that many of those might choose not to return
While Latilla-Campbell agreed that “they might take a year or two or three or four after graduation – it might take some time – lots of students with whom we’ve worked actually choose to come back”.
Essentially, it boils down to cost, and is an option mainly available to families who can afford it, noted Maggs, with the risk “that we’re creating a two-tier system where wealthy students can go abroad and everybody else stays locked out”.
On whether the problem is about competitiveness and academic excellence, or simply a system in this country of too few places and not enough institutions, Latilla-Campbell conceded it was probably both.
“It’s a fact that there are not enough spots, just as there aren’t enough spots at universities like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, University of Cambridge – but to make sure those programmes maintain that high level, there has to be some kind of cap on the numbers available.
“So creating that competitiveness ensures that students who want to go will aim to get the very top qualifications from high school, to keep up that high level of achievement.”
Asked whether medical degrees from places like Cyprus and Germany, have 100% credibility – in the views of South African regulators and employers – Latilla-Campbell said he believed they did.
Moneyweb article – SA’s medical school bottleneck pushes students overseas (Open access)
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