Is medical education and medical training for US doctors too long?

It discourages underrepresented groups from entering the medical industry

Question: Is medical education and medical training for US doctors too long?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, medical education and medical training requirements are too excessive.
Argument‹3 of 3: It discourages underrepresented groups from entering the medical industry

The expenses associated with such a long period of schooling and training can easily discourage minority groups from entering the medical field. It is important for any field including medicine to be diverse and representative of the population. We must fix any systematic issue that is preventing the field from becoming more diverse.

The argument

The medical industry desperately needs more doctors. It also needs a more representative and diverse medical force. But an increasing number of pre-medical students are concerned about the long education and financial burden associated with becoming a doctor. The students who are most impacted are ones from low socio-economic backgrounds and minority groups. In the year 2017, research showed that Hispanic medical school students remained underrepresented by nearly 70 percent. African American male enrollments were underrepresented by nearly 60 percent and African American female matriculants by nearly 40 percent. In addition, most of the people who go into medicine come from wealthy backgrounds. The average medical student is in debt of about $183,000. Such expenses can easily dissuade students coming from non-wealthy backgrounds. If the length of education and training was reduced, then more people from minority groups could afford to become doctors. An increasing number of people will start seeing medicine as a viable career rather than an unattainable goal.

Premises

[P1]The long, expensive path to becoming a doctor — with the average medical student roughly $183,000 in debt — most discourages students from low socio-economic and minority backgrounds, even as medicine already skews wealthy. [P2] This shows up in persistent underrepresentation (in 2017, Hispanic students underrepresented by nearly 70% and African American male enrollments by nearly 60%), so shortening training would let more from these groups afford medicine. [C] Therefore the excessive length of US medical education discourages underrepresented groups from entering the field, so it is too long.

Counter-arguments

It is wrong to assume that the length of education and training is discouraging minority groups from entering the medical field. If one were to observe any industry, workplace, or career in America, it is evident that there are underrepresented minority groups. This is regardless of the length of training or the amount of education required for the role. These groups could vary from one place to another but unfortunately, this happens in just about every field. The problem of such underrepresentation is deeply rooted. It is caused by systematic injustice. Simply by changing factors such as the length of training, these problems cannot be fixed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Debt is a function of tuition and living costs, not of duration alone, and the premise treats them as one thing. Shortening training removes years of fees while also removing years of eventual earnings, and it leaves untouched the far earlier filters — school quality, undergraduate cost, admissions testing and unpaid experience — where most of the attrition the argument is concerned with actually occurs. [Rejecting P2] The underrepresentation figures are real, and they are evidence of a problem rather than of this cause. The counter's observation applies: the same pattern appears across professions with training of every length, so duration cannot be doing the explanatory work. The premise then predicts that a shorter path would let more students afford medicine, with nothing offered in support, and countries with shorter medical training have not thereby produced representative intakes. [Rejecting C] The conclusion also answers a different question from the one asked. Whether training is too long depends on what competence requires, which the argument never engages: an access problem is a reason to change how training is funded before it is a reason to make it shorter.