I'm a nontrad with a decade of work inside healthcare. I read about CNU and talked to my physician friends IRL, made up my mind that it was a horrible place to go for my future, and have spent a lot of time going over and over and over with my wife how going to school in Cali is pointless if it means getting stuck in outer bumf**k afterwards for residency. But the thing is, I've got that insider knowledge and have been able to talk to program directors or APDs. I know how the game is played. Someone can look at the match list for CNU and think that they can be the one person that beats the odds. But when you're being taught in a subpar manner, at a subpar school whose very name makes committees itch for the circular file... it is hard to beat the odds no matter how hard you want it or try.
Someone who doesn't have that knowledge might not know to listen when
@Goro says that this juice is not worth the squeeze, and might just see "USMD" without understanding how the CNU USMD does not have the same weight as almost any other.
And, frankly, I don't think it will matter if an entire class gets forced out into the wilderness over this; people will put CNU on their match list as a safety school (thinking that THEY are too special to need it) and the ones that only get accepted there will be faced with an unpleasant decision. Thousands of applications flood most medical schools for dozens of slots. Cutting that number by half or three quarters would not stop a CNU 2.0 from filling. Caribbean schools have popped up like toadstool, after all.
Well said. That still doesn't mean the mainstream schools should, or, quite frankly, will, enable the bad conduct and act as de facto guarantors for people who fail to perform the required amount of due diligence before enrolling in medical school.
I went back and checked out the thread talking about how San Juan Bautista had its accreditation pulled a few years ago, as
@gyngyn referenced above. They are the only school that this has apparently ever happened to, and even they regained their accreditation a few years later. Significantly, while
@gyngyn referenced the flood of heart wrenching letters their school received, I didn't notice a mention of how many of those students were taken in by their school. My money is on zero.
You're right about there always being a market for a school like CNU. I just question whether there will always be a sanctuary outside the Caribbean for innocent students at sketchy institutions if those schools fail. CNU is not, after all, Oral Roberts. Totally different time, and totally different situation.
It looks a lot more like SJB, where it appears as though some of the students were indeed stuck in Puerto Rico without an ability to get licensed in the mainland US after they lost their accreditation. It seems as though, when LCME ultimately lowers the hammer, they really don't care who gets hurt, and innocent people potentially getting screwed over does not stop LCME from doing what they feel like they need to do to maintain the integrity of their process.
The only good news here is that, unlike in the SJB case, news of this issue has been disseminated well before the hammer might be dropped. If the school is allowed to stay open through 2024, people scheduled to graduate this year, next year, and maybe even in 2024 will be fine. That leaves a relatively small amount of people with potential issues if the worst happens and the school actually closes.
Anyone who enrolls while this is pending really does need to understand that there probably will not be anyone bailing them out on the back end. If there is any justice in the world, LCME will not allow them to enroll any future classes until this gets sorted out.