Chapter 73

I am writing this in 2024 around the time of September. A strange thing to mention I know but I promise that it’s relevant. This is because a US Optometry school is about to fire one of their deans due to a dispute they’ve been having with the students. The reason? Unclear. However, there are some clues.

I’ve been following some of the posts on Reddit and facebook and here is what I gathered. A particular US Optometry school, let’s name them USO, has lately had a run in with their students where things got a little ugly. 

From the online forums and talking with some colleagues, this is what I’ve been told so far 

• USO is an optometry school that is slightly easier to get into than others because they have a huge amount of seats
• Because of their need to fill seats, they end up accepting applicants with lower OAT scores and lower GPA’s
• Having subpar students translates directly into higher failure rates when they graduate and take board exams 
• Since board exams (called NBEO in the USA) track their participants’ schools and also release statistics about passing and failing, USO’s high failure rate is common knowledge and gives the school a bad reputation
• A bad reputation is not good for the optometry school and may directly affect the quality of future applicants

BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER. I have to remind you that these points are very speculative in nature. Some of these points may even simply be false. However, I believe there is truth in here somewhere because of the facts that are indisputable. The main facts that are adamant are that USO does have a low board exam pass rate on the NBEO website (openly accessible public knowledge) and the University where USO resides did publicly force their Dean to resign recently (also openly accessible public knowledge). With that in mind, a lot of theories have arisen.

Here is the suspected narrative:

• The students of USO are accusing the school of being unnecessarily difficult as to fail out as many students as possible 
• Since you must be a graduate of an optometry school to take the board exams, weeding out the poorly performing students means that those students won’t be able to lower the board exam scores of USO

Does that first point here sound familiar? Well, it should. This is very similar to what I went through in my time in the only Canadian English-speaking Optometry school. Though, from the sounds of it, it looks like the USO, unlike Waterloo, decided to not change anything and simply try and stay the path. 

Does this sound cruel? Kind of. If it was a true narrative that is. Unfortunately this narrative is not without a lot of he-said she-said and we may never really know the real reasons behind everything. 

On one hand, alumni of the USO are defending the dean and saying how she was one of the good ones and that they’ve never had any issues with her. Furthermore, most alumni claim that it’s the student’s fault for not studying hard enough since “this has always been the case and we made it out fine”. Aside from that fact, most alumni are saying that yes, the school system is broken but it’s unfair to blame the Dean for its shortcomings.

On the other hand, the dean has been accused of being behind giving disciplinary action towards any students who would question the school’s inefficiencies and shortcomings. I think there is a hint that some students think that the stepping down of the Dean is a necessary example to tell the world that there is a problem. To put it another way, while unfair, the Dean will have to be a martyr for the school’s problems. 

If you take the entire situation at face value. It seems like the students simply just need to suck it up. In fact, all in all this entire situation seems like one where the students who are doing poorly are looking for something to blame. However, being through the ringer, I do understand the frustrations at play. I mean even in my Canadian Optometry school, we were learning about random fluff and then being tested for it. It didn’t help my profession nor give any insight as to do better on board exams. It was simply just facts that were incorporated into the curriculum with the express intention to be tested for schools. 

As for the “this is how we’ve always done things” argument. That’s kind of a weak argument as well. In the last 10-20 years of optometry in Canada, the curriculum of the school has expanded and it seems like it’s only expanding more every year. This is to say, alumni may have actually been tested less content than the current optometry students. Hell, I even know of optometrists who were practicing when glaucoma management was solely in the realm of ophthalmology and not a thing at all in optometry. 

What I’m trying to say is that the student’s arguments about how tough they have it isn’t just random ramblings. There was merit. And that’s not even considering the ethics of censoring students who complain. That’s just a bad move in general from a media relations point of view. 

To look any further into how the curriculum works at USO or how disciplinary actions or censorship have come to be would require too much digging and unfortunately I do not run a detective firm. These are things we can’t see online afterall. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t really matter. Because the main problem here is that the narrative was VERY easily created. That’s the issue. 

Why did it get so easily created? Well. I know of one answer.

There was too much on the line. 

The talk of money has always been huge in the world of healthcare and the schools that pump out health care professionals are no exception. I mentioned in the past that while Canadian Optometry students graduate with around $60,000 CAD of student loans, American Optometry students can easily graduate with student loans of half a million dollars USD. These are not small numbers and worse still, the numbers are still increasing. 

Tuition for optometry schools are increasing, the cost for our tools are increasing and, hell, even the board exams we need to finish to finally go into practice after graduation are increasing. In 2024, the NBEO cost $1445 USD. Before COVID it was around half of that. That’s pretty insane. What does this mean for the students? Well…There’s now more pressure than ever. The opportunity costs of your career have inflated. 

Want to know the worst outcome possible in all of this economic nightmare? Picture this. 

You’re a Medical School Student who has done everything right until your second last term in school. Then, because of one reason or another, you fail. Now you have no high paying career and are left with the loans you took to pay for your tuition and residence. The banks initially lent you out a student line of credit of prime – 0.25% because they liked med school students. They had high hopes for you. But now. To them. You’re no one. That prime – 0.25% line of credit? Well. Now it’s a loan and the rates are going to change. Now you’re in debt and boy, do you have a lot of it. So what do you do? Well, you gotta start making money and you need to do it now. But how can you? You’ve just suffered a failure so big you’ve lost your entire future.

This is the scenario that shook me when I was in school and presented as my deepest darkest fear. The scariest part of the story? It has happened to students in the US all the time. I had this dark cloud over my psyche pretty much my entire time in optometry school though in truth, I was just being paranoid. Why was I paranoid? I guess my first failure had instilled upon me some irrationality. I mean…In the last decade or so, the Canadian optometry schools never had this scenario realized even once before. The Canadian optometry school was super forgiving when it came to failing. 

There are various reasons why the Canadian system is the way it is. The first reason many will point out is that the Canadian Optometry School only has 90 students a year for the entire country. Therefore, we only get the best students and rarely ever have to deal with this issue (Yeah, I don’t know how I got into the program either). The second reason why we never had this issue is that the Canadian schools allowed their students to redo the courses the following year if they failed any. If we logically look at that one step further, the reason behind this is that having 90 students from one school supply an entire country of optometrists means that not only do the students want to graduate, their country also needs them to.

This brings us right back to the story. Remember those lower years who failed and had to repeat a year? Well. That was pretty much it. They were coming back the following year to retake the courses they didn’t pass the first time. Then, they would just keep on moving along with the rest of the classes. For Waterloo Optometry, the hardest part was literally just getting into the program. After that, you’re pretty much guaranteed to pass and become an eye doctor. 

So there really was no nightmare scenario… Right? Right??? Well. For me. No. That’s because my nightmare scenario was never not graduating. I always knew that one day I would become an eye doctor after getting into Waterloo Optometry. My nightmare wasn’t about repeating a year thing. It was always about being seen as lesser than my peers. 

Generations of shame culture from my Chinese background had instilled upon me a thought that my life was worthless if I didn’t excel the most at absolutely everything. To fail is to be useless and worthless. Failing publically, even just briefly, diminished my life’s value in my eyes. I don’t think the topic of Asian’s and mental health gets talked about enough. We care about lives too little and achievement and success too much. 

These are the conditions that created the tiger parents and if you pay enough attention, it seems the tiger parent was inevitable. Our values simply pushed for it.