Comment by alistairSH
4 hours ago
Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent).
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
I've noticed the same trend with SWEs tbh. Many new grads from the top schools have parents who were SWEs or SWE adjaent
In the United States i suspect some portion of this is due to "legacy" admissions whereby some child is admitted to a competitive program or given very advantageous scholarships not because of their hard work and displayed competence, but because of their parents. I know that it will be very possible for my children to end up at ivy league if they take the legacy advantage I've given them, even though ivy league has been completely off the table for me my entire life. They'll start _much, much_ higher on the ladder than I could.
Joining Military isn't really a "class" thing - unless you mean lower income people join the military more often to get started in life.
Military academies are more of a upper class thing though.
Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
That gating on medical training has always been there (at least for 40 years, if not more). But the number of doctors from doctor families has increased.
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
Always been gated. But the slider has been dragged even further in the purity test direction. The intelligent un-pure now tend to become NP or PA, those programs still let you practice independently and slide more towards academics and less at whether a rich person set you up to be taken care of while you play mother Teresa until the switch flips the day you are accepted.
> Medical schools require a lot of volunteering
But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades?
Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
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