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How to Find Teachers? Biggest headache is finding and paying the faculty to teach bedside medicine in the last two years. Salaries are low: for full professors rarely as much as $20,000, nearly always much less than a first-rate physician could earn in private practice. Some schools settle for second-rate teachers. Others compromise by taking on professors halftime, leaving them half a work week to make a living in private practice. Since this leaves no time for research, the best schools insist on a hard core of full-time faculty members. Even so, these are outnumbered by part-time specialty teachers, often unpaid. There are now 331 full-time budgeted positions open in U.S. medical schools, with no qualified takers.
Although he pays less than a fifth of the cost of his professional education, the medical student does not have it easy either. With the price of a microscope (range: $500 to $1,000) added to what he pays for tuition, books and living expenses, he cannot hope to get by for less than $1,600 a year at an out-of-the-way state school, closer to $3,000 if he goes to a private school in a big city. Then, with a minimum of a year's internship at niggardly pay, he loses five years (beyond college) during which he might have been earning money. For the schools to raise tuition fees would bear heavily on the already hard-pressed student, and would do little to close their budget wounds. Upshot: despite heavy contributions, notably those raised by the Fund for Medical Education that Ike praised, the schools still need $10 million a year to break even.
* Teachers include, besides physicians engaged in all 19 medical specialties, instructors and technicians in such subjects as anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, microbiology, parasitology, pharmacology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, X rays, physics, electronics, psychology and sociology.