Early in the last century, medical education came to be dominated by the medical profession’s main organization, the American Medical Association. The AMA wanted to improve medical education and used its lobbying power to raise schools up to its standards, including four years of study. Those standards might have made for better doctors, but also fewer of them. (About a decade later, the American Bar Association would pull the same trick to create a high barrier to entry into the law field.)

Must med school take four years? In today’s Martin Center article, Daniel Buck says that it need not and that three-year schools are on the way.

After noting that many med schools are now wasting time with woke stuff to keep the DEI fanatics happy, Buck writes, “That being said, there are a few medical schools, such as NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, that are heading in a new, surprisingly promising direction: They’ve crammed the traditional four-year course of study into three years, trimming the electives and carrying classes through the summer. This simple innovation in medical education is not only successful in itself but points to a better approach to higher learning more generally.”

He points to research showing that students who have gone through three-year med schools are just as competent as those who spent four years in med school. That’s not surprising. As with lawyers, doctors continue to learn after they’ve finished their obligatory period of formal instruction, and the hospitals and clinics that employ them have every incentive to make sure they’re optimally trained.

Read the whole thing.