The whole point would be to skip the "general education" part and teach directly useful parts. You can even have an entry test for what you expect students to know, that will create a common baseline.
We don't have a national curriculumn. If you start requiring college level general education from high school students, you're biasing selection against kids whose schools can't or won't provide those classes. There's no way to force local schools to change without a major overhaul of our entire system.
We don't do that in the United States for any other undergraduate professional degrees. Engineers, accountants, pharmacists, nurses, teachers etc... all require college level general education.
In the vast majority of high schools biology and chemistry aren’t remotely comparable to the college lab based classes.
High school English isn’t generally equivalent to college English. High school history isn’t equivalent etc…
General education for doctors also includes calc based physics, so you need calculus as well.
Do you think people want to go to a doctor that has a less broad education than their accountant so they can save 3% on their medical bills?
Why don’t we do an experiment? A new medical classification—MDWL (medical doctor without letters). MDWLs go directly out of high school to a 6 year med school where all the fluff has been cut out. No history, no general chemistry, biology, physics, calculus, English, art history, political science, literature, sociology, psychology, foreign language, business etc…
Then let people choose whether they want to save $10 on an office visit to go the MDWL.
Physicians salaries btw represent about 8% of medical costs. So even if we did manage to cut medical education from 8 to 6 years we’re talking maybe saving 2%. That 2% would be eaten up by rising administrative costs, and most of those the cost savings would likely be taken by private equity. Not passed on to the consumer.
