Why do today's college students riot?

I wish I knew.

I realize I am a dinosaur, and many things have changed since I went to college, but at least when students rioted in the '60s, it was about a war.

Students at the University of Kentucky rioted after their team lost in the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament. I suppose you could say they were disappointed and decided to vent outdoors.

This article says at least 17 couches were burned. Why is it that people in the South burn couches when they riot? Where do they get these couches? Are there a lot of living rooms without couches in the South? Is there a market for asbestos couches?

Not to be outdone by the Wildcats, students at the University of Connecticut rioted because they won the NCAA title. I can understand celebrating, but rioting?

College students riot when they lose and riot when they win.

Lacking powerhouse basketball teams, students at the University of California Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College apparently have to invent a reason to riot. Every spring they take to the streets for a weekend called "Deltopia." This year's event resulted in 100 arrests and 44 injuries requiring treatment at a hospital. Last year there was a death when a woman fell off a cliff.

Instead of rioting, maybe they should spend more time studying. The UCSB student newspaper published a piece called "An Open Letter in Defense of Deltopia" written by a student who wisely chose to remain anonymous. The letter is stunningly stupid in both syntax and theme and must be read firsthand to be fully appreciated.

In case you don't have time, here are some excerpts from that apologia:

Do not forget the student activism that has taken place within this community over the course of its inception.

I assure you, the urge to rage will long outlast the budget of Santa Barbara to keep sending in large numbers of police.

They treat the UC students as if they didn’t have to work hard to get here, and they treat the CC students like they’ll never amount to anything of substance. Contrarily, SBCC and UCSB are beacons of the educational process in their own respects.

To those lobbied against the students, you should definitively decide how much animosity, brutality and prejudice you are going to harbor and exert on the students who call this place home.

If this is an example of what these "beacons of the educational process" are turning out, rioting about the faculty and the curriculum might be justified.

Should medical school be shortened to 3 years?

I say, "No." Here's why.

There is way too much to learn in 3 years. Unless medical education is radically changed, it will be impossible for students to memorize all the unnecessary stuff they still have to memorize, complete all their clerkships, and move onto the next phase—residency training.

I do not see how medical students can choose a career path before they have had experience with rotations in all of the major specialties. I have had numerous queries from students in four-year schools who do not know what they want to specialize in even by the first part of their fourth year.

Yes, the fourth year of medical school currently is not productive. However, the amount of time needed for students to choose their specialties and interview at 15 or more different residency programs could not possibly be squeezed into the third year of a three-year program.

Some have said that shortening medical school to three years would increase the number of doctors produced. That would be true for one year when schools would graduate two classes, the three-year and four-year groups. But after that year, the same number of students would graduate from school as did so when the length of time was four years.

By the way, that year with the double graduating classes would be difficult to manage because there is already a predicted shortage of residency positions by 2015. This is due to the federal government's cap on the funding of resident positions. Graduating more than 40,000 medical students at the same time when only about 25,000 residency slots are available would be chaotic.

Here's a better solution.

The length of time it takes to become a doctor could be shortened by simply not mandating that every medical student have a four-year undergraduate degree before starting medical school.

Who says that medical students need to have a bachelor's degree in anything? If for some reason that is still desired, students could attend college through the summers to pick up enough credits for a degree.

A few medical schools in the United States have had accelerated programs in place for many years. For example, a program jointly run by Penn State University and Jefferson Medical College graduates doctors with both BS and MD degrees in six or seven years. It's been around since 1964. A longitudinal study over 26 years showed that doctors who completed that accelerated program performed at a level indistinguishable from traditional eight-year graduates.

A recent compilation lists several colleges/medical schools (of 140 or so MD-granting medical schools in the US) with similar accelerated programs.

Several European countries use similar models and seem to have healthy citizens.

Shortening or accelerating the undergraduate experience would save a year or two of tuition expense, accomplish the desired saving of time, and not disrupt the four-year med school cycle.

Of course, this will not get any further than this blog because I am not a "good old boy" with any influence on those who run medical education.