Hong Kong’s education system stands out as it has produced students with impressive academic prowess despite its minuscule size. It is no mean feat that in the challenging International Baccalaureate exam, Hong Kong featured 31 perfect scorers.
Historically, some one-third of these academic overachievers chose to study medicine. Year after year, headlines celebrate highfliers in exams entering medical schools at the University of Hong Kong or the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Medicine is seen locally not just as a respectable career but as the pinnacle of academic achievement and personal success. A career in medicine is often associated with high social status and a high income. Why do Hong Kong’s best and brightest tend to view a medical career this way? Is that good for society in general, and in realizing one’s true inner passion in particular? Further, with artificial intelligence poised to transform virtually every profession, should these students also not consider whether their choices align with their genuine intellectual passions, aptitudes, and the evolving nature of work? For many families, especially those from modest backgrounds, having a child enter medical school is the ultimate symbol of upward mobility and family honor. Parents often see medicine as the most secure, respectable, and meaningful profession their children can pursue. It’s also widely supported by schools, which usually encourage their academic overachievers to opt for medicine as a form of institutional prestige.
This narrowing of ambition may not be beneficial to society. Such a concentration of talent in one profession creates severe imbalances. Other important areas, such as legal practice, education, environmental science, engineering, architecture, technological innovation, and public service, including public administration, need to have top brains as well. As a result, society risks a “brain drain”, not out of the city, but out of the other vital sectors, failing to attract the best candidates. Furthermore, many students who enter medicine may not be motivated by a genuine calling to the caring profession, but rather by familial obligations. This could result in a lack of engagement, professional dissatisfaction, and even burnout. When students choose medicine for reasons other than responding to a calling, both the profession and the patients suffer from a lack of genuine commitment in the practitioner.
The notion that medicine guarantees lifelong occupational stability, a high income, and prestige is also increasingly being challenged. Artificial intelligence is beginning to fundamentally reshape how professional work is being carried out. AI systems have demonstrated their capacity to make accurate prognoses and do so much quicker, routinely outperforming human doctors. To give one personal example. I once asked an oncologist friend who specializes in the treatment of breast cancer to provide me with the data of one patient. The data included the genetic makeup of the cancer cells. To a layperson, or even a doctor who is not a breast cancer specialist, those data were complete gobbledygook. I fed them into a large language model such as ChatGPT and asked for a treatment plan. The plan it spewed out was the same as what my oncologist friend planned for her patient. My friend does not know how to use ChatGPT. She was astounded at the result and is now taking a course on Coursera on the use of ChatGPT. Before long, many routine aspects of medical practice may be automated or delegated to machines, and the way doctors practice medicine will be vastly different from the way it is being done now.
This transformation raises a key question: Are today’s top students choosing medicine based on what it is and will become, or on an outdated image of what it used to be? As medicine becomes more protocol-driven, tech-mediated, and systematized, it may no longer offer the kind of autonomy, prestige, or personal fulfillment that earlier generations imagined. If AI can handle much of the technical work, future doctors will need to focus on areas that cannot be automated — empathy, ethics, leadership, and creativity. However, academic examinations do not capture those qualities, and high academic scores do not necessarily correlate with possessing them.
For many years, Singapore’s medical schools have chosen medical students not based entirely on their academic scores. Instead, they use a more holistic approach and use what is known as the Aptitude Based Admission Scheme, in which the student’s aptitude for the profession or study, commitment, passion, and so on are assessed. Though it still requires good academic grades, other elements are evaluated as well. It is not a “get-around” route for those with poor grades. So academic grades do count, but they’re not the be-all and end-all.
Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, had foreseen the problem arising from most of the country’s top brains going into medicine. Society needs other talent as well, such as engineers, town planners, architects, educators, musicians and government officials. Hence, many scholarship programs offering extremely attractive terms are available, but they require the student to take up particular subjects. Furthermore, these scholarships could be for overseas studies, not just to Anglophone countries, but also to Japan, Germany, or France, where the language of study is alien to the recipient. Therefore, recipients have to spend one year on intensive language study before beginning their actual university course. I know a friend who knew absolutely no German but was directed to study engineering in Germany. This program produces many “brains”, while at the same time, managing to establish links to many overseas institutions and contacts. Most of those scholarships carry with them a bond for a few years, often up to six years. For example, once a student accepts the scholarship, they are bound to work in Singapore for at least six years. Alternatively, if the work is overseas, the assignment must be with a Singapore company. Some of the scholarship-sponsoring bodies, such as the Singapore Armed Forces Scholarship, require the recipients to work for the sponsoring body for several years.
In light of all this, at the personal level of decision-making, isn’t it time to encourage students to make decisions based not only on academic results and familial expectations, but also on personal passion, aptitude and an understanding of the evolving dynamic nature of work? The future economy will reward those who can think critically, collaborate across disciplines and culture, and solve complex, human-centric problems creatively. A society is strongest when its top talent is distributed across sectors, and not concentrated in a few narrow fields. Therefore, at the societal or even government level, isn’t it time to consider adopting some of the policies of the Singapore government in directing talented students into other areas of study, and even to different countries, to broaden their perspectives as they learn their specialty?
In the interest of society at large, we should encourage young people to explore their area of personal interest and aptitude, and avoid channeling them into a select few fields. The new generation must know how to use AI in whatever field interests them. As Professor Andrew Ng, the founder of Google Brain and one of the 100 most influential people in AI, as named by Time Magazine in 2023, said, the future is not whether AI will replace human employment, but whether those who know how to use AI in their professions will win over those who don’t. The same applies to societies.
The author has previously held teaching positions in medicine at the University of Hong Kong and London University. He now practices as a hematologist in Singapore and is a principal mediator of the Singapore Mediation Center.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
