With school leavers around the country receiving their ATAR scores, many students are beginning to enrol in their desired university courses for 2024. However, one subject stands out among the rest.
Medicine is among the most desired tertiary courses for elite school graduates to undertake, in some cases beating out other disciplines such as engineering, computer science, law and business management, research shows.
On the other hand, students from disadvantaged, lower socio-economic backgrounds are far less likely to undertake degrees in medicine, fueling a future where graduates of medicine degrees will not be representative of communities that they will serve.
The study, ‘Cultures of Success: How elite students develop and realise aspirations to study Medicine’, was led by Associate Professor Christina Ho from the University of Technology Sydney in collaboration with researchers from Western Sydney University and Macquarie University.
Associate Professor Ho says there is a disparity in Australia in demographics of students who undertake medical degrees, where students selected to study medicine do not reflect the diversities of the communities that graduates will serve.
“This paper builds on previous research we’ve done on inequalities in the education system, in particular, the barriers faced by students from disadvantaged backgrounds in accessing courses such as medicine,” she said.
“We wanted to investigate how even aspirations to study medicine are unequally distributed. Among elite students, a disproportionate number aspire to medicine while many disadvantaged students assume it is not for them.”
Associate Professor Ho said the study – which is based on interviews with students from an academically selective school in Sydney – found that elite students had higher levels of aspirational capacity.
Not only did they overwhelmingly aspire to prestigious and lucrative professions, but they had the resources and skills to achieve their goals.
“Entry into selective schools is extremely competitive and these schools tend to outperform many prestigious high-fee private schools in the HSC,” she said.
“In the paper we describe a culture of success in both home and school, and how practices in both sites reinforce each other. It is a culture of high aspirations, gruelling workloads and intense competition.
“There is a culture within the high school we studied of aspiring towards the most prestigious courses, particularly medicine and law. This creates a culture of competition to see who can gain entry into these courses, showing that aspirations are highly social as opposed to individual.”
While students within the school environment are seen to have high aspirations, Associate Professor Ho says it’s often the case that home environments also contribute to students’ high aspirations.
“At home, parents, mostly highly educated migrants from Asia, set the bar high and provide resources for their children to engage with their studies at the highest level,” she said.
“At school, students are surrounded by peers who are equally driven and success oriented. The combination creates great aspirational capacity, in other words, high aspirations and also the knowledge and skills to realise one’s aspirations.”
“Having great aspirational capacity is hugely beneficial to students because it is not just about ‘dreaming big’ but knowing what it takes to realise one’s dreams. It is about strategic planning, institutional knowledge and how to work to a demanding schedule to achieve success.
“However, we also discuss what we call aspirational constriction. In our research we noticed that these high achieving students prematurely foreclosed their career goals.
“The aspiration to study medicine was so dominant within our target school, in large part because of the symbolic significance of medicine. Because it is so difficult to get into medicine, it is the foremost symbol of educational success, of hard work, perseverance and intelligence.”
Despite this, Associate Professor Ho said studying courses such as medicine is not necessarily the best career choice for every student.
“What other opportunities are students missing by barely considering other career options, particularly less prestigious ones?,” she said.
“What is our society missing out on, when so many high achievers are concentrated into one profession? And what about students from less advantaged backgrounds who may be more suited to medicine but are ‘crowded out’ by high achievers?”
