Opportunity

If you conduct a survey to determine what schools do our medical students come from, you will be surprised to find that the Pareto principle is wrong – we are not having 80% of our students coming from 20% of the schools, but, 95% of them from 5% of the schools.

Let’s face it: Some school do give better students and have superior result in public examinations. No, these schools may not be offering better teaching (oh, they may, of course), but, rather, recruiting better kids , having more resource, or, having students with more resource.

The reality is, there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of schools in our city: private or public. Yes, both types have good or not-so-good ones. To study in a good private school, the family should be well-off enough to pay for the tuition fee, which is often not a humble sum.

How about good public schools? Alas, they consider several factors when recruiting students, and two remarkable ones are whether your parents are alumni and where you live. In other words, if your parents graduated from a good school, you are more likely to have the same privilege. Alternatively, if your family could afford living in a “good” area (which usually means more expensive), you would also have a better chance.

You see? What we are getting at is, not (or, not only) that students from the grassroots class are less willing to choose medicine, they are simply less likely to have an examination result good enough to apply.