Doctors’ offspring hold grip over medical school places

The strong grip that doctors’ families hold over places in Irish medical schools is highlighted in a new analysis which shows how children of doctors disproportionately fill the limited number of places in university medicine courses, writes Katherine Donnelly for the Independent.ie.

Among first-year students with one parent a doctor, 20% chose medicine and where both parents are doctors, it rises to 33%. The figures emerged in an analysis of parental occupations of 67,000 entrants to higher education for the three years from 2015 to 2017.

The extent to which the children of doctors dominate medical schools in Ireland was highlighted in the analysis, which was undertaken by Victor Pigott, senior statistics manager at the Higher Education Authority (HEA) as part of broader research work still under way. The HEA research is focusing on the study choices of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and how they tend to not choose the highest points courses even when they have the points to do so and certainly not to the same extent as students from privileged backgrounds. This is particularly the case in medicine.
Full report on the Independent.ie site