The answer is, "Doctor" but are you ready for a mediocre physician to do your brain surgery?
It is not just the lower incentive for people to choose to go to medical school, graduate one or two hundred thousand dollars in debt, and with the lower reimbursements spend ten years paying off debts. The other problem is the quality of American college graduates is not what it used to be so medical schools don't have the pool of the best and brightest to train. Where have these great potential physicians, jurists, engineers, researchers, and innovative software designers gone?
College Dropout Rising...FOR GIFTED KIDS More and more gifted kids are dropping or flunking out of college therefore gone from the graduate school applicant pool. It is not news that gifted children are failing to thrive in schools encumbered by the high stakes standardized tests. What is becoming evident now that the generation trained through the teach-to-the-test homogenized curriculum also lost out on opportunities to develop their gifts and talents. Without opportunities to develop higher cognition, judgment, and analysis, or experience the challenge of academic engagement suited to their abilities, they arrived at college unprepared for their first ever experience of having to develop organizational skills, apply effort to achieve success, and needing to ask for help.
In the past we've heard excuses like, "All kids are gifted in their own way" but now the mantra is, "We can't afford the time to devote to gifted kids when the test results look at how many kids get satisfactory scores. There is no "credit" for scores high above average, but there are penalties for the numbers scoring below average."
When I left my neurology practice to "make a difference" in education twelve years ago, one low performing school administrator told the faculty, "The best use of your time is with students just below passing. Time spent helping them raises our test score rating. The kids in the bottom quarter take too much time to reach the standards and the best use of gifted kids is to have them work with that near passing group, because we don't get any higher test rating for superior test scores." Sounds outrageous, but this is the mandate passed down from administrators who are charged with bringing up test passing numbers or face fund reduction and closure.
They Never Learn to Think Gifted children are usually willing to help a classmate, but are turned off to school when that is their responsibility much of the day with no opportunities for enrichment and challenge to keep them motivated. "Twice-gifted" children lose out in the push to "get through" the overstuffed curriculum required for the test. The excessive quantity of material teachers must "cover" and students must memorize leaves insufficient teacher time to observe and discover children who are gifted, but need to their exceptional abilities to compensate for their learning challenges.
Even for the gifted children who are identified and not used as unpaid instructional aides for classmates, the funding for special programs has been siphoned into the underperforming students for greatest "bang for the buck" test score fixes.
Other gifted children with social or emotional disabilities are not identified as gifted because they are identified as having behavior problems. These behavior problems are the manifestations of the brain's involuntary response to the stress of anxiety, boredom, or frustration. When academics are one-size-fits-all, the unchallenged brain goes into the reactive state where the behavior outputs are limited to fight/flight/freeze. What teachers see in class are students acting out or zoning out because once they master the material, they are left to follow along with the whole class and listen to the same material taught and drilled over and over.
Spiral of Failure But why shouldn't gifted students finally have their chance to shine once they are in college, especially the very best colleges and universities to which they were accepted? Unless they were fortunate enough to go to private schools or high performing schools where test pressure did not leach into all aspects of the school experience, they miss something important that sets them up for failure in college—they never learned to think.
Students in the U.S. are underprepared for higher learning and the jobs of the 21st century. Many gifted students who are now in college experienced a K-12 education that included an over-packed curriculum and teach-to-the test homogenized instruction. The pressure that many K-12 educators experience to "get through the curriculum" leaves little time for students to experience the problem-based learning needed to build their highest thinking and reasoning skills.
When these students reached college during the past four years they were faced with challenges requiring the executive functions they did not develop in the years before college. These are the higher brain processing networks that direct organizing, prioritizing, resistance of immediate gratification, goal-development, critical analysis, and independent thinking. After years of memorizing were all that was required for high test scores, and no opportunity to experience the challenges that promote the development of the neural networks that are needed for these executive functions, gifted students were unprepared cognitively and emotionally for their new challenges.
Success Without Challenge Doesn't Prepare Students for Reality Gifted students, who previously were highly successful when assessments were limited to regurgitation of memorized information, were not prepared for judging the validity of sources of information or the use of induction, deduction, and critical analysis to write academic papers. The consequences resulting from inadequate development of their highest cognitive thinking led many highly gifted students into a spiral of failure.
The increase in amount of information overwhelmed even the most proficient memories because these students did not have experience prioritizing what was the most important information or recognizing core ideas would serve to relate isolated facts into connecting concepts. Their studying was inefficient and inadequate for the new assessments they faced.
Without previously having to independently plan their time, especially for long-term projects and papers, which were cut from a curriculum dedicated to force-feeding facts, these students were suddenly struggling for the first time in their lives. For many, this experience caused them to question their intelligence, feel like frauds, and fear asking for help and exposing themselves as not deserving of the "gifted" label they'd been given.
Especially in the top colleges, the change in the type of work was difficult for students who never previously had to organize their time effectively or use critical analysis and insightful, creative thinking to solve challenging problems. Memorizing came easy to them and thinking was not necessary to excel at the minimal demands on their brains during their precollege earlier years.
The college experience included more work and more freedom, balancing the greater work load with the need for sleep and exercise, and just as they needed the skills and guidance to make good planning and judgment choices, they did not have the easy access to familiar classroom teacher in a small class. Many of their classmates without the same intellectual gifts received guidance from teachers in high school to help them learn to plan their time for long-term projects by requiring sections of these reports or projects to be turned in at regular intervals. Suddenly in college work assigned at the beginning of a semester and due ten or more weeks later, was not something the gifted students could put off until the night before and still get the easy A their work got in high school. Tests and reading required more effort and thought than "last minute cramming" could provide.
