- At a Cross-Road
Student learning within a professional degree granting framework has arrived at a crossroad. The advantages of virtual learning and the need for face to face experiential internships require new kind of debates and new educator-employer relationships that are relevant in post COVID era.
- For Professional Students (Post-COVID)
Some of these thoughts and actions are presented here for professional students, academicians and professional credentialing agencies.
At City Tech, in the professional BS program for radiological sciences we are still adjusting to the pros and cons of virtual and hybrid platforms and the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on clinical internships. On one hand clinical imaging simulations have exceeded expectations due to continuous technical developments while on the other, the patient centered hospital internships have degraded in quality as most of the clinical trainers are half-skilled or unskilled hospital workers themselves. Our clinical instructors from City Tech have to play a passive role and are not directly involved in patient care at the hospital sites. This has led to lower confidence, increased stress and reduced board performance nationwide for professional Radiology students.
- Changing Unwritten Contracts
Apart from this situation for professional internships the base employment that our professional students have during their BSRS education is changing. As hospitals are desperate now to find and use trained radiologic technologists, they have incentivized 16 hour a day workload at their base jobs. That leaves little time for such professional students to pursue our college degree. In spite of this short-sighted business practices hospitals do realize the value of our degree and a BS is fast becoming mandatory for continuous employment.
There is also a traditional, competing practice by the NYC employers to provide limited, on the job training to meet the workforce shortage as a short term solution diminishing the role of campus based higher education. This can be overcome only by active marketing and by recognition of our high quality Bachelors programs by students and their employers.
- Look Around
The US educators in Allied departments of Radiologic Technology have not offered a solution; they have not found a solution. Hence we do not have successful role models from allied schools that we can follow. Rather we are learning from the practices of successful medical schools that are adjusting their models and methods to produce high quality Radiology Physicians and Surgeons, like the ones from Duke, the Johns Hopkins and the Imperial College of Medicine.
- It is the Market Stupid
Our BSRS program does get some support from NYC Cornell, from Maimonides, from Langone and Mt Sinai that employ our students and offer clinical internships when applicable. But our main ingredient of success and growth is the supply of diverse, ambitious students trained at various basic RAD Tech programs like from our own and also from professional Associate programs at Hostos, BCC, LGCC, WCC and a few more. The synergy depends on identifying the complementary nature of our 2+2 system where the first 2 years are completed by a very select group of RAD Tech majors in those colleges and the last 2 years at City Tech under BSRS umbrella.
- Failure by Success
The highly competitive student pool that clears the AAS Rad Tech programs successfully get quite lucrative clinical jobs (often too much lucrative with a mandatory workload of 16 hr/day), they then survive the high cost squeeze of New York but now face the pressure to perform at the job and move up in higher education including our BSRS and then often to a Masters.
- If it is so hard, why to do it
This scenario is very challenging for both the students and the teachers, and is very different from the conventional 4-year degree programs or full–time learning. Here the major fraction of student resources is already tied up to their jobs (often as the sole earner in their family) and the BSRS faculty has to motivate and educate them with very different passions and promises. At City Tech we do it as if our life depends on them, which is actually the fact. All of our lives depend on them since they are the healthcare workers; and since they come to us for further education, they must be semi-skilled, thus making our life depend on our education, to some extent, right!
