"Doctors, meanwhile, learned humility. If you’re a doctor, it’s one thing to know, as an abstract fact, that 10 or 20 percent of patients who seemed to die of heart attack actually died from pulmonary embolism. It is quite another to have a pathologist dissect one of your patients and tell you No, this woman you took care for 25 years, and whose husband you pass on the street each day, did not die of heart attack; she died of a pulmonary embolism, and that’s probably why she complained of shortness of breath when you examined her three months ago. An angiogram might have spotted it."
If we increase the rate of autopsies, the higher degree of accountability for doctors will lead to higher stress levels in the profession. The rate of suicide in physicians is already far above average. The US should be doing more autopsies, but we should increase them in a way that supports the profession, rather than giving our culture another way to point fingers at doctors and say "your mistake killed that person".
>The institutions that can afford to attract the experts themselves should continue to do so, as Minerva is doing and the Ivy Leagues will continue to do. Those that can’t attract experts (the inherent majority) should start more heavily leveraging third-party curricula rather than producing second-tier courses designed internally.
Agreed, but not at the expense of specialization. Core curriculum access across regions could be powerful, but also limiting. A good example of this is graduate school applications: many graduate programs will hesitate to offer admission to students who have attended the same university for their undergraduate work, the assumption being that students should acquire a diverse set of perspectives to create their own ideas.
One thing I'm told has changed about the U.S. educational system over the last 20 years is that the amount of individual mentorship that students receive has strongly declined.
When I transitioned into graduate school, one big surprise was that school actually became easier in several senses:
- I had a clear role model (mentor)
- I had several good sounding boards for ideas (professors had more time for me than for undergrads, and graduate students were also closer friends)
- More frequent communication with professors translated to better grades (if they're aware of your thought processes, they can more clearly understand how to interpret your work).
As a result, I felt much more involved in the work I was doing. That feeling of involvement made me more invested (and more confident) in my work.
I know that some colleges are working on programs to supplement mentorship and structure, and are finding great success. For example, in the ASAP program (http://www1.cuny.edu/sites/asap/), the graduation rate is more than three times the national three-year graduation rate of 16% for urban community colleges. It would be interesting to see whether life outcomes ("success") are any different for people who go through this program.
If we increase the rate of autopsies, the higher degree of accountability for doctors will lead to higher stress levels in the profession. The rate of suicide in physicians is already far above average. The US should be doing more autopsies, but we should increase them in a way that supports the profession, rather than giving our culture another way to point fingers at doctors and say "your mistake killed that person".