With a reputation as diploma mills, Caribbean medical schools are dedicated for-profit businesses that serve rejected applicants from the United States – but they still depend on American hospitals for the crucial clinical experience required during the second half of a medical education. Of late, however, efforts have been afoot in New York City to preserve the limited space available in hospitals for those studying at American schools. 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 take just about anyone able to pay, especially those rejected by more prestigious American 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 provide a lot of money, reducing costs to around forty-five thousand dollars each year. In contrast, a Caribbean medical school can charge as much as sixty thousand dollars!
And with so much money available, 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.
This is the business of a medical education today.
You see, what hospitals do is mentor medical students in exchange for using the school’s prestige. And though Caribbean institutions are not prestigious, they have tons of money, which is a most important consideration, naturally.
And what administrator is going to do without such money, especially in this economy?