You too can be a doctor

From now on, aspiring students won't have to pass a test before entering the Faculty of Medicine of the National University of Rosario. The student center had been demanding this for ages. Now, what does it mean?

The student centers of public universities in Argentina are all actually, and quite plainly, political movements. They're branches of well-known political parties, and they help recruit young members for them and gather people for demonstrations. For example, Franja Morada is a branch of the Radical Civic Union, which was born during the University Reform of 1918, and the MNR (which is currently the dominant movement in most faculties in Rosario) is a branch of the Socialist Party. As in all small and loosely regulated groups of this kind, the actual ideology is unimportant. The leaders stay on top by giving the other members what they want, which is done by organizing them and sending them to demand it before the authorities. The arguments used to support the demands need not be well-thought.

The issue of the entry exam was a casus belli for the university student movements. The exam was a filter. Before becoming a university student, the reasoning went, you should show you'd mastered basic concepts in highschool, and/or were prepared to invest time studying them now in your own time. In that way, you wouldn't be entering university-level classes without preparation.

The movements demanded that there was no exam invoking ideological reasons: the University Reform of 1918 revolutionized universities by advancing the idea that higher education should be public, free of charge, and free of restrictions, for everyone. (This acted as a great equalizer. Even today, despite the horrific state of education in Argentina, our universities continue producing fairly good professionals.) Thus, an exam that left you out of university before even starting it was a violation of the spirit of the Reform.

With the exam gone, everybody will be free to start studying. What's the problem with that? Well, the exam routinely filters out more than 50% of the aspiring students. Where will those extra students fit? Public university classrooms are already uncomfortably crowded, which works against the quality of teaching. Then also, those new students won't be among the brightest. Most will just be victims of a bad system that lets them graduate from highschool without knowing basic elements of basic subjects. But they'll slow down the rest — since the professors will have no choice but to go over what they should already know. You can't teach epidemiology without the basics of statistics, and you can't do statistics if you don't know math.

What does this mean for the political movements that pass for representatives of the student body? For starters, they'll have many more people to recruit from. Those people will be students who are having trouble keeping up with the rest, and they'll have even more incentive to give up study and protest more. (The leaders of university movements must be the worst students. They manage to stay in university until they're over 30 by presenting to one or two exams per year, so as to prolong their course indefinitely. You can't formally be a student leader and have a place in the government of the university if you're not a student.)

The answer is, of course, to have better education in the lower levels, and to show students the alternatives. There are too many doctors and too few nurses, for example. And there should be entry exams in all critical careers. Call me an elitist, but (provided there's a chance) I don't want anybody who isn't the best of the best to handle my health and my life.