Oh good, it's this thread again.
As I've said before: Carib schools are not dead-ends. Lots of people go to a carib school, graduate, get a US residency, and have successful careers as physicians. The problem is that it seems very likely that a sizable number of people end up failing out, or never matching. And the schools try to hide this behind their flashy websites. Some schools are more established and better than others, for sure.
Since we're discussing Ross, let's focus on them. Although, the same could be said of any of the schools.
First, deceptive advertising. The first thing I wanted to know was how many students Ross accepts. Be my guest and try to find out on their website. It's not listed at all. They have three classes, and based upon other websites, 400-600 per class with the Fall start being the largest.
Student retention: They say it's 89%. But if we assume that there are 400 per term (probably a low end estimate) x 3 terms = 1200 students per year. Now we go to their match list page for 2017, I copied the list into Excel. There are 614 categorical matches, and another 25 prelim surgery, and this is for both current and prior grads. That's much less than 1200, and much more than an 11% attrition. The attrition rate seems much higher, probably more like 25%. Whether that's "bad" (i.e.they are taking advantage of gullible students) or whether it's "good" (they give people a second chance) is all relative.
Match results -- also unclear from all of their websites. But it's interesting to look at 2013. If you look at Charting Outcomes from the Match for 2013, the match results per country are listed (they were removed in the 2016 version). Dominica had 595 matches, and 505 non matches.
@Veritas_et_Visus is correct that it's hard to interpret this, because there are two schools on Dominica -- Ross and All Saints. But All Saints claims "over 1000 students total" currently -- assuming 1200, that's 300 per class -- and they have two campuses, one on a different island, so probably 100-150 on Dominica. Hence, even if not a single all saints student matched (which is obviously wrong), the match result from Ross is not great. And, in case you don't believe that data, let's use Ross's own data - from their 2013 match list, they claim 733 students obtained residency spots. Since we know that only 595 total Dominica students matched, it's clear that many ended up in the scramble.
So, bottom line (or TL;DR): Carib schools are a potential option for those who can't get into US schools. Anyone who simply goes to the Carib without trying in the US because it's "easier and faster" is foolish. Carib schools clearly try to hide their attrition rates, and make "match" rates look better by including people who get spots after the match, and probably manipulate their statistics by having students "withdraw" rather than fail out. The better known carib schools likely have better results than the less well known.
What you need to take away from this though is that you need to be aware that your chances of getting a residency could be significantly decreased if you choose to attend a Caribbean school. Without a residency, you won't be able to practice medicine, and you'll be left with a very expensive piece of paper.
